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The Edition de Luxe is printed from type and will 
be lifnited to Five Hundred Copies, of which this is 



No. 



GEBBIE and COMPANY. 



r f 



Prc'srdent. 




Secretary. 



r' 



UNIFORM EDITION 



THE 

WINNING OF THE WEST 

An Account of the Exploration and Settlement 
OF Our Country from the Alle- 

GHANIES to the PACIFIC 



By 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT 



Volume I. 



PHILADELPHIA 

GEBBIE AND COMPANY 
1903 



E&60 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Receivfd 

WAR 21 1903 

I ^ CopyrighJ Entry 
CLASS fV XXC N« 
COPY A. * 



^^ 



Copyright, i88g 
Copyright, 1903 

by 

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 



This edition of " The Winning of the West" is issued under 
special arrangement with G. P. Putnam's Sons. 



THIS BOOK 

IS DEDICATED, WITH HIS PERMISSION 

TO 

FRANCIS PARKMAN 

TO WHOM AMERICANS WHO FEEL A PRIDE IN THE 

PIONEER HISTORY OF THEIR COUNTRY 

ARE SO GREATLY INDEBTED 



"O strange New World that yit wast never young, 
Whose youth from thee by gripin' need was wrung, 
Brown foundhn' o' the woods, whose baby-bed 
Was prowled roun' by the Injun's cracklin' tread, 
And who grew'st strong thru shifts an' wants an' pains, 
Nursed by stem men with empires in their brains, 
Who saw in vision their young Ishmel strain 
With each hard hand a vassal ocean's mane; 
Thou skilled by Freedom and by gret events 
To pitch new states ez Old World men pitch tents. 
Thou taught by fate to know Jehovah's plan, 
Thet man's devices can't unmake a man. 

"Oh, my friends, thank your God, if you have one, that he 
'Twixt the Old World and you set the gulf of a sea; 
Be strong-backed, brown-handed, upright as your pines, 
By the scale of a hemisphere shape your designs." 

Lowell. 



VOL. I. 



M 



PREFACE 

UCH of the material on which this work is 
based is to be found in the archives of the 
American Government, which date back 
to 1774, when the first Continental Congress as- 
sembled. The earHest sets have been published 
complete up to 1777, under the title of American 
Archives, and will be hereafter designated by this 
name. These early volumes contain an immense 
amount of material, because in them are to be 
found memoranda of private individuals and many 
of the public papers of the various colonial and 
State governments, as well as those of the Confed- 
eration. The documents from 1 789 on — no longer 
containing any papers of the separate States — 
have also been gathered and printed under the 
heading of American State Papers, by which term 
they will be hereafter referred to. 

The mass of public papers coming in between 
these two series, and covering the period extend- 
ing from 1776 to 1789, have never been pub- 
lished, and in great part have either never been 
examined, or else have been examined in the most 
cursory manner. The original documents are all 
in the Department of State at Washington, and 

vii 



Vlll 



Preface 



for convenience will be referred to as "State 
Department MSS." They are bound in two or 
three hundred large volumes; exactly how many 
I cannot say, because, though they are numbered, 
yet several of the numbers themselves contain 
from two or three to ten or fifteen volumes apiece. 
The volumes to which reference will most often be 
made are the following: 

No. 15. Letters of Huntington. 

No. 16. Letters of the Presidents of Congress. 

No. 18. Letter-Book B. 

No. 20. Vol. I. Reports of Committees on State 
Papers. 

No. 27. Reports of Committees on the War 
Office. 1776-1778. 

No. 30. Reports of Committees. 

No. 32. Reports of Committees of the States 
and of the Week. 

No. 41. Vol. 3. Memorials E. F. G. 1776- 
1788. 

No. 41. Vol. 5. Memorials K. L. 1 777-1 789. 

No. 50. Letters and papers of Oliver Pollock. 
1777-1792. 

No. 51. Vol. 2. Intercepted Letters. 1779- 
1782. 

No. 56. Indian Affairs. 

No. 71. Vol. I. Virginia State Papers. 

No. 73. Georgia State Papers. 



Preface ix 

No. 8 1. Vol. 2. Reports of Secretary John Jay. 

No. 1 20. Vol. 2. American Letters. 

No, 124. Vol. 3. Reports of Jay. 

No. 125. Negotiation Book. 

No. 136. Vol. I. Reports of Board of Treasury 

No. 136. Vol. 2. Reports of Board of Treasury. 

No. 147. Vol. 2. Reports of Board of War. 

No. 147. Vol. 5. Reports of Board of War. 

No. 147. Vol. 6. Reports of Board of War. 

No. 148. Vol. I. Letters from Board of War. 

No. 149. Vol. I. Letters and Reports from B. 
Lincoln, Secretary at War. 

No. 149. Vol. 2. Letters and Reports from B. 
Lincoln, Secretary at War. 

No. 149. Vol. 3. Letters and Reports from B. 
Lincoln, Secretary at War. 

No. 150. Vol. I. Letters of H. Knox, Secretary 
at War. 

No. 150. Vol. 2. LettersofH. Knox, Secretary 
at War. 

No. 150. Vol. 3. LettersofH. Knox, Secretary 
at War. 

No. 152. Vol. II. Letters of General Washing- 
ton. 

No. 163. Letters of General Clinton, Nixon, 
Nicola, Morgan, Harmar, Muhlenburg. 

No. 169. Vol. 9. Washington's Letters. 

No. 180. Reports of Secretary of Congress. 

Besides these numbered volumes, the State 



X Preface 

Department contains others, such as Washington's 
letter-book, marked War Department 1792, '3, '4, 
'5. There are also a series of numbered volumes 
of Letters to Washington, Nos. ^;^ and 49, contain- 
ing reports from George Rogers Clark, The Jeffer- 
son papers, which are likewise preserved here, are 
bound in several series, each containing a number 
of volumes. The Madison and Monroe papers, 
also kept here, are not yet bound ; I quote them as 
the Madison MSS. and the Monroe MSS. 

My thanks are due to Mr. W. C. Hamilton, As- 
sistant Librarian, for giving me every facility to 
examine the material. 

At Nashville, Tennessee, I had access to a mass 
of original matter in the shape of files of old news- 
papers, of unpublished letters, diaries, reports, and 
other manuscripts. I was given every opportu- 
nity to examine these at my leisure, and, indeed, 
to take such as were most valuable to my own 
home. For this my thanks are especially due to 
Judge John M. Lea, to whom, as well as to my 
many other friends in Nashville, I shall always 
feel under a debt on account of the unfailing cour- 
tesy with which I was treated. I must express 
my particular acknowledgments to Mr. Lemuel R. 
Campbell. The Nashville manuscripts, etc., of 
which I have made most use are the follow^ing : 

The Robertson MSS., comprising two large vol- 
umes, entitled the Correspondence, etc., of Gen'l 



Preface xi 

James Robertson, from 1784 to 18 14. They be- 
long to the Hbrary of Nashville University ; I had 
some difficulty in finding the second volume, but 
finally succeeded. 

The Campbell MSS., consisting of letters and 
memoranda to and from different members of the 
Campbell family, who were prominent in the Revo- 
lution ; dealing for the most part with Lord Dun- 
more's war, the Cherokee wars, the battle of King's 
Mountain, land speculations, etc. They are in the 
possession of Mr. Lemuel R. Campbell, who most 
kindly had copies of all the important ones sent 
me, at great personal trouble. 

Some of the Sevier and Jackson papers, the 
original MS. diaries of Donelson on the famous 
voyage down the Tennessee and up the Cumber- 
land, and of Benj. Hawkins while surveying the 
Tennessee boundary, memoranda of Thos. Wash- 
ington, Overton, and Dunham, the earliest files of 
the Knoxville Gazette from 1791 to 1795, etc. 
These are all in the library of the Tennessee His- 
torical Society. 

For original matter connected with Kentucky, I 
am greatly indebted to Colonel Reuben T. Durrett, 
of Louisville, the founder of the"Filson Club," 
which has done such admirable historical work of 
late years. He allowed me to work at my leisure 
in his library, the most complete in the world on 
all subjects connected with Kentucky history. 



xii Preface 

Among other matter, he possesses the Shelby MSS., 
containing a number of letters to and from, and a 
dictated autobiography of, Isaac Shelby; MSS. 
journals of Rev. James Smith, during two tours in 
the western country in 1785 and '95 ; early files of 
the " Kentucke "Gazette; books owned by the early 
settlers ; papers of Boon and George Rogers Clark ; 
MS. notes on Kentucky by George Bradford, who 
settled there in 1779 ; MS. copy of the record book 
of Colonel John Todd, the first governor of the 
Illinois country after Clark's conquest ; the McAfee 
MSS., consisting of an Account of the First Settle- 
ment of Salt River, the Autobiography of Robert 
McAfee, and a Brief Memorandum of the Civil and 
Natural History of Kentucky; MS. autobiography 
of Rev. William Hickman, who visited Kentucky 
in 1776, etc. 

I am also under great obligations to Colonel John 
Mason Brown of Louisville, another member of 
the Filson Club, for assistance rendered me ; par- 
ticularly for having sent me six bound volumes of 
MSS., containing the correspondence of the Span- 
ish Minister Gardoqui, copied from the Spanish 
archives. 

At Lexington I had access to the Breckenridge 
MSS., through the kindness of Mr. Ethelbert D. 
Warfield; and to the Clay MSS. through the 
kindness of Miss Lucretia Hart Clay. I am particu- 
larly indebted to Miss Clay for her courtesy in 



Preface xiii 

sending me many of the most valuable old Hart 
and Benton letters, depositions, accounts, and the 
like. 

The Blount MSS. were sent to me from Cali- 
fornia by the Hon. W. D. Stephens of Los Angeles, 
although I was not personally known to him — an 
instance of courtesy and generosity in return for 
which I could do nothing save express my sincere 
appreciation and gratitude, which I take this 
opportunity of publicly repeating. 

The Gates MSS., from which I drew some im- 
portant facts not hitherto known concerning the 
King's Mountain campaign, are in the library of 
the New York Historical Society. 

The Virginia State Papers have recently been 
published, and are now accessible to all. 

Among the most valuable of the hitherto un- 
touched manuscripts which I have obtained, are 
the Haldimand papers, preserved in the Canadian 
archives at Ottawa. They give, for the first time, 
the British and Indian side of all the northwestern 
fighting; including Clark's campaigns, the siege 
of Boonsborough, the battle of the Blue Licks, 
Crawford's defeat, etc. The Canadian archivist, 
Mr. Douglass Brymner, furnished me copies of all 
I needed with a prompt courtesy for which I am 
more indebted than I can well express. 

I have been obliged to rely mainly on these col- 
lections of early documents as my authorities, 



xiv Preface 

especially for that portion of western history prior 
to 1783. Excluding the valuable, but very brief, 
and often very inaccurate, sketch which Filson 
wrote down as coming from Boon, there are no 
printed histories of Kentucky earlier than Mar- 
shall's, in 181 2; while the first Tennessee history 
was Haywood's, in 1822. Both Marshall and 
Haywood did excellent work; the former was an 
able writer, the latter was a student, and (like the 
Kentucky historian Mann Butler) a sound political 
thinker, devoted to the Union, and prompt to 
stand up for the right. But both of them, in deal- 
ing with the early history of the country beyond 
the Alleghanies, wrote about matters that had 
happened from thirty to fifty years before, and 
were obliged to base most of their statements on 
tradition or on what the pioneers remembered in 
their old age. The later historians, for the most 
part, merely follow these two. In consequence, 
the mass of original material, in the shape of offi- 
cial reports and contemporary letters, contained 
in the Haldimand MSS., the Campbell MSS., the 
McAfee MSS., the Gardoqui MSS., the State De- 
partment MSS., the Virginia State Papers, etc., 
not only cast a flood of new light upon this early 
history, but necessitate its being entirely re-writ- 
ten. For instance, they give an absolutely new 
aspect to, and in many cases completely reverse, 
the current accounts of all the Indian fighting, 



Preface xv 

both against the Cherokees and the northwestern 
tribes; they give for the first time a clear view 
of frontier diplomacy, of the intrigues with the 
Spaniards, and even of the mode of life in the 
backwoods, and of the workings of the civil gov- 
ernment. It may be mentioned that the various 
proper names are spelt in so many different ways, 
that it is difficult to know which to choose. Even 
Clark is sometimes spelt Clarke.while Boon was ap- 
parently indifferent as to whether his name should 
or should not contain the final silent e. As for 
the original Indian titles, it is often quite impos- 
sible to give them even approximately ; the early 
writers often wrote the same Indian words in such 
different ways that they bear no resemblance 
whatever to one another. 

In conclusion, I would say that it has been to me 
emphatically a labor of love to write of the great 
deeds of the border people. I am not bhnd to 
their manifold shortcomings, nor yet am I ignorant 
of their many strong and good qualities. For a 
number of years I spent most of my time on the 
frontier, and lived and worked like any other fron- 
tiersman. The wild country in which we dwelt 
and across which we wandered was in the far West ; 
and there were, of course, many features in which 
the life of a cattleman on the great plains and 
among the Rockies differed from that led by a 
backwoodsman in the Alleghany forests a century 



xvi Preface 

before. Yet the points of resemblance were far 
more numerous and striking. We guarded our 
herds of branded cattle and shaggy horses, hunted 
bear, bison, elk, and deer, established civil govern- 
ment, and put down evil-doers, white and red, 
on the banks of the Little Missouri, and among 
the wooded, precipitous, foothills of the Bighorn, 
exactly as did the pioneers who a hundred years 
previously built their log cabins beside the Ken- 
tucky or in the valleys of the Great Smokies. The 
men who have shared in the fast-vanishing frontier 
life of the present feel a peculiar sympathy with 
the already long- vanished frontier life of the past. 



Sagamore Hill, May, 1889. 



CONTENTS 

PAGB 

CHAPTER I 
The Spread of the English-Speaking Peoples i 

CHAPTER II 
The French of the Ohio Valley, 1763-1775 32 

CHAPTER III 
The Appalachian Confederacies, 17 65-1775 56 

CHAPTER IV 
The Algonquins of the Northwest, 1769-1774 81 

CHAPTER V 
The Backwoodsmen of the Alleghanies, 1769-1774. 117 

CHAPTER VI 
Boon and the Long Hunters; and their Hunting 

in No-Man's Land, i 769-1 774 i57 

CHAPTER VII 
Sevier, Robertson, and the Watauga Common- 
wealth, 1769-1774 19s 

CHAPTER VIII 
Lord Dunmore's War, 1774 228 

Appendices: 

Appendix A — To Chapter IV 257 

Appendix B — To Chapter V 264 

Appendix C — To Chapter VI 268 

Appendix D — To Chapter VI 270 

Appendix E — To Chapter VII 271 

VOL. I. 

xvu 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



On the Way to Church . . . Frontispiece 
R. G. Vosburgh 



'e>* 



The Green-Corn Dance 74 

P. R. Audibert 

Robertson Meets the Cherokees . . . 224 
Louis Bauhan 

Massacre of the Logan Family . . . 246 
P. R. Audibert 



VOL. I. 

XIX 



INTRODUCTION TO THE NARRATIVE 
COVERING THE FOUNDING OF THE 
TRANS-ALLEGHANY COMMONWEALTH, 

1 780-1 790. 

THE period covered in this division includes 
the seven years immediately succeeding 
the close of the Revolutionary War. It 
was during these seven years that the Constitution 
was adopted, and actually went into effect — an 
event, if possible, even more momentous for the 
West than for the East. The time was one of 
vital importance to the whole nation — alike to the 
people of the inland frontier and to those of the 
seaboard. The course of events during these 
years determined whether we should become a 
mighty nation, or a mere snarl of weak and quar- 
relsome little commonwealths, with a history as 
bloody and meaningless as that of the Spanish- 
American states. 

At the close of the Revolution the West was 
peopled by a few thousand settlers, knit by but 
the slenderest ties to the Federal Government. A 
remarkable inflow of population followed. The 
warfare with the Indians, and the quarrels with 

VOL. I. 

XXI 



xxii Introduction 

the British and Spaniards over boundary ques- 
tions, reached no decided issue. But the rifle- 
bearing freemen, who founded their Httle republics 
on the western waters, gradually solved the ques- 
tion of combining personal liberty with national 
union. For years there was much wavering. 
There were violent separatist movements, and at- 
tempts to establish complete independence of the 
eastern States. There were corrupt conspiracies 
between some of the w^estem leaders and various 
high Spanish officials, to bring about a disrup- 
tion of the Confederation. The extraordinary 
little backwoods State of Franklin began and 
ended a career unique in our annals. But the 
current, though eddying and sluggish, set towards 
union. By 1790 a firm government had been es- 
tablished west of the mountains, and the trans- 
Alleghany commonwealths had become parts of 
the Federal Union. 

T. R. 

Sagamore Hill, Long Island, 
October, 1894. 



INTRODUCTION TO THE RECORD OF 
THE ACCESSION OF THE TERRITORY 
OF LOUISIANA AND THE NORTHWEST, 

1791-1807. 

THIS division covers the period which fol- 
lowed the checkered but finally successful 
war waged by the United States Govern- 
ment against the northwestern Indians, and deals 
with the acquisition and exploration of the vast 
region that lay beyond the Mississippi. It was 
during this period that the West rose to real 
power in the Union. The boundaries of the old 
West were at last made certain, and the new West, 
the far West, the country between the Mississippi 
and the Pacific, was added to the national domain. 
The steady stream of incoming settlers broad- 
ened and deepened year by year ; Kentucky, 
Tennessee, and Ohio became States, Louisiana, 
Indiana, and Mississippi territories. The popula- 
tion in the newly settled regions increased with a 
rapidity hitherto unexampled ; and this rapidity, 
alike in growth of population and in territorial 
expansion, gave the West full weight in the na- 
tional councils. 



VOL. I. xxiii 



xxiv Introduction 

The victorious campaigns of Wayne in the 
north, and the innumerable obscure forays and 
reprisals of the Tennesseeans and Georgians in the 
south, so cowed the Indians, that they all, north 
and south alike, made peace — the first peace the 
border had known for fifty years. At the same 
time the treaties of Jay and Pinckney gave us in 
fact the boundaries which the peace of 1783 had 
only given us in name. The execution of these 
treaties put an end in the north to the intrigues 
of the British, who had stirred the Indians to hos- 
tility against the Americans ; and in the south to 
the far more treacherous intrigues of the Span- 
iards, who showed astounding duplicity, and 
whose intrigues extended not only to the Indians, 
but also to the baser separatist leaders among the 
Westerners themselves. 

The cession of Louisiana followed. Its true 
history is to be found, not in the doings of the 
diplomats, who determined merely the terms upon 
which it was made, but in the western growth of 
the people of the United States from 1769 to 1803, 
which made it inevitable. The men who settled 
and peopled the western wilderness were the men 
who won Louisiana; for it was surrendered by 
France merely because it was impossible to hold 
it against the American advance. Jefferson, 
through his agents at Paris, asked only for New 
Orleans ; but Napoleon thrust upon him the great 



Introduction xxv 

West, because Napoleon saw, what the American 
statesmen and diplomats did not see, but what 
the Westerners felt — he saw that no European 
power could hold the country beyond the Missis- 
sippi when the Americans had made good their 
foothold upon the hither bank. 

It remained to explore the unknown land ; and 
this task fell, not to mere wild hunters, such as 
those who had first penetrated the wooded wilder- 
ness beyond the Alleghanies, but to officers of the 
regular army, who obeyed the orders of the Na- 
tional Government. Lewis, Clark, and Pike were 
the pioneers in the exploration of the vast territory 
the United States had just gained. 

The names of the Indian fighters, the treaty- 
makers, the wilderness wanderers, who took the 
lead in winning and exploring the West, are mem- 
orable. More memorable still are the lives and 
deeds of the settler folk for whom they fought and 
toiled ; for the feats of the leaders were rendered 
possible only by the lusty and vigorous growth of 
the young commonwealths built up by the throng 
of westward-pushing pioneers. The raw, strenu- 
ous, eager social life of these early dwellers on the 
western waters must be studied before it is possible 
to understand the conditions that determined the 
continual westward extension of the frontier. Ten- 
nessee, during the years immediately preceding 
her admission to Statehood, is especially well 



xxvi Introduction 

worth study, both as a typical frontier commun- 
ity, and because of the opportunity afforded to 
examine in detail the causes and course of the In- 
dian wars. 

In this division I have made use of the material 
to which reference was made in the pr^ace of 
1889; beside the American State Papers, I have 
drawn on the Canadian Archives, the Draper 
Collection, including especially the papers from 
the Spanish archives, the Robertson MSS., and 
the Clay MSS. for hitherto unused matter. I 
have derived much assistance from the various 
studies and monographs on special phases of 
western history; I refer to each in its proper 
place. I regret that Mr. Stephen B. Weeks' s 
valuable study of the Martin family did not ap- 
pear in time for me to use it while writing about 
the little State of Franklin in an earlier division 
of this narrative. 

T. R. 

Sagamore Hill, Long Island, 
May, 1896. 



THE WINNING OF 
THE WEST 



CHAPTER I 

THE SPREAD OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLES 

DURING the past three centuries the spread 
of the EngHsh-speaking peoples over the 
world's waste spaces has been not only the 
most striking feature in the world's history, but 
also the event of all others most far-reaching in its 
effects and its importance. 

The tongue which Bacon feared to use in his 
writings, lest they should remain forever unknown 
to all but the inhabitants of a relatively unimport- 
ant insular kingdom, is now the speech of two con- 
tinents. The Common Law which Coke jealously 
■ upheld in the southern half of a single European 
island, is now the law of the land throughout the 
vast regions of Australasia, and of America north 
of the Rio Grande. The names of the plays that 
Shakespeare wrote are household words in the 
mouths of mighty nations whose wide domains 



2 The Winning of the West 

were to him more unreal than the realm of Prester 
John. Over half the descendants of their fellow- 
countrymen of that day now dwell in lands which, 
when these three Englishmen were born, held not 
a single white inhabitant; the race which, when 
they were in their prime, was hemmed in between 
the North and the Irish seas, to-day holds sway 
over worlds whose endless coasts are washed by 
the waves of the three great oceans. 

There have been many other races that at one 
time or another had their great periods of race ex- 
pansion, — as distinguished from mere conquest, — 
but there has never been another whose expansion 
has been either so broad or so rapid. 

At one time, many centuries ago, it seemed as if 
the Germanic peoples, like their Celtic foes and 
neighbors, would be absorbed into the all-con- 
quering Roman power, and, merging their ident- 
ity in that of the victors, would accept their law, 
their speech, and their habits of thought. But this 
danger vanished forever on the day of the slaugh- 
ter by the Teutoburger Wald, when the legions of 
Varus were broken by the rush of Hermann's wild 
warriors. 

Two or three hundred years later the Germans, 
no longer on the defensive, themselves went forth 
from their marshy forests, conquering and to con- 
quer. For century after century they swarmed 
out of the dark woodland east of the Rhine and 



The English-Speaking Peoples 3 

north of the Danube ; and as their force spent it- 
self, the movement was taken up by their brethren 
who dwelt along the coasts of the Baltic and the 
North Atlantic. From the Volga to the Pillars of 
Hercules, from Sicily to Britain, every land in turn 
bowed to the warlike prowess of the stalwart sons 
of Odin. Rome and Novgorod, the imperial city 
of Italy as well as the squalid capital of Muscovy, 
acknowledged the sway of kings of Teutonic or 
Scandinavian blood. 

In most cases, however, the victorious invaders 
merely intruded themselves among the original 
and far more numerous owners of the land, ruled 
over them, and were absorbed by them. This 
happened to both Teuton and Scandinavian — to 
the descendants of Alaric as well as to the children 
of Rurik. The Dane in Ireland became a Celt ; the 
Goth of the Iberian peninsula became a Spaniard ; 
Frank and Norwegian alike were merged into the 
mass of Romance-speaking Gauls, who themselves 
finally grew to be called by the names of their mas- 
ters. Thus it came about that though the German 
tribes conquered Europe they did not extend the 
limits of Germany nor the sway of the German 
race. On the contrary, they strengthened the 
hands of the rivals of the people from whom 
they sprang. They gave rulers— kaisers, kings, 
barons, and knights — to all the lands they overran ; 
here and there they imposed their own names on 



4 The Winning of the West 

kingdoms and principalities — as in France, Nor- 
mandy, Burgundy, and Lombardy; they grafted 
the feudal system on the Roman jurisprudence, 
and interpolated a few Teutonic words in the Latin 
dialects of the peoples they had conquered; but, 
hopelessly outnumbered, they were soon lost in 
the mass of their subjects, and adopted from them 
their laws, their culture, and their language. As a 
result, the mixed races of the south, — the Latin 
nations as they are sometimes called, — strength- 
ened by the infusion of northern blood, sprang 
anew into vigorous life, and became for the time 
being the leaders of the European world. 

There was but one land whereof the winning 
made a lasting addition to Germanic soil ; but this 
land was destined to be of more importance in the 
future of the Germanic peoples than all their con- 
tinental possessions, original and acquired, put to- 
gether. The day when the keels of the Low-Dutch 
sea-thieves first grated on the British coast was big 
with the doom of many nations. There sprang up 
in conquered southern Britain, when its name 
had been significantly changed to England, that 
branch of the Germanic stock which was in the 
end to grasp almost literally world-wide power, 
and by its over-shadowing growth to dwarf into 
comparative insignificance all its kindred folk. 
At the time, in the general wreck of the civilized 
world, the making of England attracted but little 



The English-Speaking Peoples 5 

attention. Men's eyes were riveted on the em- 
pires conquered by the hosts of Alaric, Theodoric, 
and Clovis, not on the swarm of Httle kingdoms 
and earldoms founded by the nameless chiefs who 
led each his band of hard-rowing, hard-fighting 
henchmen across the stormy waters of the German 
Ocean. Yet the rule and the race of Goth, Frank, 
and Burgund have vanished from off the earth, 
while the sons of the unknown Saxon, Anglian, and 
Friesic warriors now hold in their hands the fate of 
the coming years. 

After the great Teutonic wanderings were over, 
there came a long lull, until, with the discovery of 
America, a new period of even vaster race expan- 
sion began. During this lull the nations of Europe 
took on their present shapes. Indeed, the so- 
called Latin nations — the French and Spaniards, 
for instance — may be said to have been born after 
the first set of migrations ceased. Their national 
history, as such, does not really begin until about 
that time, whereas that of the Germanic peoples 
stretches back imbroken to the days when we first 
hear of their existence. It would be hard to say 
which one of half a dozen races that existed in 
Europe during the early centuries of the present 
era should be considered as especially the ancestor 
of the modem Frenchman or Spaniard. When the 
Romans conquered Gaul and Iberia they did not 
in any place drive out the ancient owners of the 



The Winning of the West 



o 



soil; they simply Romanized them, and left them 
as the base of the population. By the Prankish 
and Visigothic invasions another strain of blood 
was added, to be speedily absorbed, while the in- 
vaders took the language of the conquered people, 
and established themselves as the ruling class. 
Thus the modem nations who sprang from this 
mixture derive portions of their governmental sys- 
tem and general policy from one race, most of 
their blood from another, and their language, law, 
and culture from a third. 

The English race, on the contrary, has a per- 
fectly continuous history. When Alfred reigned, 
the English already had a distinct national being ; 
when Charlemagne reigned, the French, as we use 
the term to-day, had no national being whatever. 
The Germans of the mainland merely overran the 
countries that lay in their path ; but the sea-rovers 
who won England to a great extent actually dis- 
placed the native Britons, The former were ab- 
sorbed by the subject-races; the latter, on the 
contrary, slew or drove off or assimilated the 
original inhabitants. Unlike all the other Ger- 
manic swarms, the English took neither creed nor 
custom, neither law nor speech, from their beaten 
foes. At the time when the dynasty of the Capets 
had become firmly established at Paris, France 
was merely part of a country where Latinized 
Gauls and Basques were ruled by Latinized 



The English-Speaking Peoples 7 

Franks, Goths, Burgunds, and Normans ; but the 
people across the Channel then showed little trace 
of Celtic or Romance influence. It would be hard 
to say whether Vercingetorix or Caesar, Clovis or 
Syagrius, has the better right to stand as the 
prototype of a modern French general. There 
is no such doubt in the other case. The average 
Englishman, American, or iVustralian of to-day 
who wishes to recall the feats of power with 
which his race should be credited in the shadowy 
dawn of its history, may go back to the half- 
mythical glories of Hengist and Horsa, perhaps 
to the deeds of Civilis the Batavian, or to those of 
the hero of the Teutoburger fight, but certainly 
to the wars neither of the Silurian chief Caractacus 
nor of his conqueror, the after-time Emperor 
Vespasian. 

Nevertheless, when, in the sixteenth century, the 
European peoples began to extend their dominions 
beyond Europe, England had grown to differ pro- 
foundly from the Germanic countries of the 
mainland. A very large Celtic element had been 
introduced into the English blood, and, in addi- 
tion, there had been a considerable Scandinavian 
admixture. More important still were the radical 
changes brought by the Norman conquest ; chief 
among them the transformation of the old English 
tongue into the magnificent language which is now 
the common inheritance of so many widespread 



8 The Winning of the West 



peoples. England's insular position, moreover, 
permitted it to work out its own fate compara- 
tively unhampered by the presence of outside 
powers ; so that it developed a type of nationality 
totally distinct from the types of the European 
mainland. 

All this is not foreign to American history. 
The vast movement by which this continent was 
conquered and peopled cannot be rightly under- 
stood if considered solely by itself. It was the 
crowning and greatest achievement of a series of 
mighty movements, and it must be taken in con- 
nection with them. Its true significance will be 
lost unless we grasp, however roughly, the past 
race-history of the nations who took part therein. 

When, with the voyages of Columbus and his 
successors, the great period of extra-European 
colonization began, various nations strove to share 
in the work. Most of them had to plant their 
colonies in lands across the sea ; Russia, alone, was 
by her geographical position enabled to extend her 
frontiers by land, and, in consequence, her com- 
paratively recent colonization of Siberia bears 
some resemblance to our own work in the western 
United States. The other countries of Europe 
were forced to find their outlets for conquest and 
emigration beyond the ocean, and, until the col- 
onists had taken firm root in their new homes the 



The English-Speaking Peoples 9 

mastery of the seas thus became a matter of vital 
consequence. 

Among the lands beyond the ocean America 
was the first reached and the most important. It 
was conquered by different European races, and 
shoals of European settlers were thrust forth upon 
its shores. These sometimes displaced and some- 
times merely overcame and lived among the 
natives. They also, to their own lasting harm, com- 
mitted a crime whose shortsighted folly was worse 
than its guilt, for they brought hordes of African 
slaves, whose descendants now form immense pop- 
ulations in certain portions of the land. Through- 
out the continent we therefore find the white, red, 
and black races in every stage of purity and inter- 
mixture. One result of this great turmoil of con- 
quest and immigration has been that, in certain 
parts of America, the lines of cleavage of race are 
so far from coinciding with the lines of cleavage of 
speech that they run at right angles to them — as 
in the four communities of Ontario, Quebec, Hayti, 
and Jamaica. 

Each intruding European power, in winning for 
itself new realms beyond the seas, had to wage a 
twofold war, overcoming the original inhabitants 
with one hand, and with the other warding off the 
assaults of the kindred nations that were bent on 
the same schemes. Generally, the contests of the 
latter kind were much the most important. The 



lo The Winning of the West 

victories by which the struggles between the Euro- 
pean conquerors themselves were ended deserve 
lasting commemoration. Yet, sometimes, even 
the most important of them, sweeping though 
they were, were in parts less sweeping than they 
seemed. It would be impossible to overestimate 
the far-reaching effects of the overthrow of the 
French power in America; but Lower Canada, 
where the fatal blow was given, itself suffered 
nothing but a poHtical conquest, which did not 
interfere in the least with the growth of a French 
state along both sides of the lower St. Lawrence. 
In a somewhat similar way Dutch communities 
have held their own, and indeed have spnmg up, 
in South Africa. 

All the European nations touching on the At- 
lantic seaboard took part in the new work, with 
very varying success — Germany alone, then rent 
by many feuds, having no share therein. Portu- 
gal founded a single state, Brazil. The Scandina- 
vian nations did little ; their chief colony fell under 
the control of the Dutch. The English and the 
Spaniards were the two nations to whom the 
bulk of the new lands fell, the former getting 
much the greater portion. The conquests of the 
Spaniards took place in the sixteenth century. The 
West Indies and Mexico, Peru and the limitless 
grass plains of what is now the Argentine Confeder- 
ation, — all these and the lands lying between them 



The English-Speaking Peoples 1 1 

had been conquered and colonized by the Spaniards 
before there was a single English settlement in 
the New World, and while the fleets of the Catholic 
king still held for him the lordship of the ocean. 
Then the cumbrous Spanish vessels succumbed to 
the attacks of the swift war-ships of Holland and 
England, and the sun of the Spanish world-domin- 
ion set as quickly as it had risen. Spain at once 
came to a standstill; it was only here and there 
that she even extended her rule over a few neigh- 
boring Indian tribes, while she was utterly unable 
to take the offensive against the French, Dutch, 
and English. But it is a singular thing that these 
vigorous and powerful new-comers, who had so 
quickly put a stop to her further growth, yet 
wrested from her very little of what was already 
hers. They plundered a great many Spanish cities 
and captured a great many Spanish galleons, but 
they made no great or lasting conquest of Spanish 
territory. Their mutual jealousies, and the fear 
each felt of the others, were among the main causes 
of this state of things; and hence it came about 
that after the opening of the seventeenth century 
the wars they waged against one another were of 
far more ultimate consequence than the wars they 
waged against the former mistress of the western 
world. England in the end drove both France 
and Holland from the field ; but it was under the 
banner of the American Republic, not under that 



12 The Winning of the West 

of the British monarchy, that the EngHsh-speaking 
peoples first won vast stretches of land from the 
descendants of the Spanish conquerors. 

The three most powerful of Spain's rivals waged 
many a long war with one another to decide which 
should grasp the sceptre that had slipped from 
Spanish hands. The fleets of Holland fought with 
stubborn obstinacy to wrest from England her 
naval supremacy ; but they failed, and in the end 
the greater portion of the Dutch domains fell to 
their foes. The French likewise began a course of 
conquest and colonization at the same time the 
English did, and after a couple of centuries of 
rivalry, ending in prolonged warfare, they also 
succumbed. The close of the most important 
colonial contest ever waged left the French with- 
out a foot of soil on the North American mainland ; 
while their victorious foes had not only obtained 
the lead in the race for supremacy on that conti- 
nent, but had also won the command of the ocean. 
They thenceforth found themselves free to work 
their will in all seagirt lands, unchecked by hostile 
European influence. 

Most fortunately, when England began her 
career as a colonizing power in America, Spain 
had already taken possession of the populous 
tropical and subtropical regions, and the northern 
power was thus forced to form her settlements in 
the sparsely peopled temperate zone. 



The English-Speaking Peoples 13 

It is of vital importance to remember that the 
EngHsh and Spanish conquests in America differed 
from each other very much as did the original con- 
quests which gave rise to the EngHsh and the 
Spanish nations. The EngHsh had exterminated 
or assimilated the Celts of Britain, and they sub- 
stantially repeated the process with the Indians of 
America ; although of course in America there was 
very little, instead of very much, assimilation. 
The Germanic strain is dominant in the blood of 
the average Englishman, exactly as the English 
strain is dominant in the blood of the average 
American. Twice a portion of the race has shifted 
its home, in each case undergoing a marked change, 
due both to outside influence and to internal de- 
velopment; but in the main retaining, especially 
in the last instance, the general race characteris- 
tics. 

It was quite otherwise in the countries con- 
quered by Cortes, Pizarro, and their successors. 
Instead of killing or driving off the natives as the 
EngHsh did, the Spaniards simply sat down in the 
midst of a much more numerous aboriginal popu- 
lation. The process by which Central and South 
America became Spanish bore very close resem- 
blance to the process by which the lands of 
southeastern Europe were turned into Romance- 
speaking countries. The bulk of the original inhab- 
itants remained unchanged in each case. There 



14 The Winning of the West 

was little displacement of population. Roman 
soldiers and magistrates, Roman merchants and 
handicraftsmen were thrust in among the Celtic 
and Iberian peoples, exactly as the Spanish mili- 
tary and civil rulers, priests, traders, land-owners, 
and mine-owners settled down among the Indians 
of Peru and Mexico. By degrees, in each case, the 
many learnt the language and adopted the laws, 
religion, and governmental system of the few, al- 
though keeping certain of their own customs and 
habits of thought. Though the ordinary Spaniard 
of to-day speaks a Romance dialect, he is mainly 
of Celto-Iberian blood ; and though most Mexicans 
and Peruvians speak Spanish, yet the great ma- 
jority of them trace their descent back to the sub- 
jects of Montezuma and the Incas. Moreover, 
exactly as in Europe little ethnic islands of Breton 
and Basque stock have remained unaffected by the 
Romance flood, so in America there are large com- 
munities where the inhabitants keep unchanged 
the speech and the customs of their Indian fore- 
fathers. 

The English-speaking peoples now hold more 
and better land than any other American nation- 
ality or set of nationalities. They have in their 
veins less aboriginal American blood than any of 
their neighbors. Yet it is noteworthy that the 
latter have tacitly allowed them to arrogate to 
themselves the title of "Americans," whereby to 



The English-Speaking Peoples 15 

designate their distinctive and individual nation- 
ality. 

So much for the difference between the way in 
which the English and the way in which other 
European nations have conquered and colonized. 
But there have been likewise very great differences 
in the methods and courses of the English-speak- 
ing peoples themselves, at different times and in 
different places. 

The settlement of the United States and Canada, 
throughout most of their extent, bears much re- 
semblance to the later settlement of Australia 
and New Zealand. The English conquest of India 
and even the English conquest of South Africa 
come in an entirely different category. The first 
was a mere political conquest, like the Dutch con- 
quest of Java or the extension of the Roman Em- 
pire over parts of Asia. South Africa in some 
respects stands by itself, because there the English 
are confronted by another white race which it is as 
yet uncertain whether they can assimilate, and, 
what is infinitely more important, because they 
are there confronted by a very large native popu- 
lation with which they cannot mingle, and which 
neither dies out nor recedes before their advance. 
It is not likely, but it is at least within the bounds 
of possibility, that in the course of centuries the 
whites of South Africa will suffer a fate akin to 
that which befell the Greek colonists in the Tauric 



1 6 The Winning of the West 

Chersonese, and be swallowed up in the over- 
whelming mass of black barbarism. 

On the other hand, it may fairly be said that in 
America and Australia the English race has already 
entered into and begun the enjoyment of its great 
inheritance. When these continents were settled 
they contained the largest tracts of fertile, tem- 
perate, thinly peopled country on the face of the 
globe. We cannot rate too highly the importance 
of their acquisition. Their successful settlement 
was a feat which by comparison utterly dwarfs all 
the European wars of the last two centuries ; just 
as the importance of the issues at stake in the wars 
of Rome and Carthage completely overshadowed 
the interests for which the various contemporary 
Greek kingdoms were at the same time striving. 

Australia, which was much less important than 
America, was also won and settled with far less 
difficulty. The natives were so few in number and 
of such a low type, that they practically offered no 
resistance at all, being but little more hindrance 
than an equal number of ferocious beasts. There 
was no rivalry whatever by any European power, 
because the actual settlement — not the mere ex- 
patriation of convicts — only began when England, 
as a result of her struggle with Republican and 
Imperial France, had won the absolute control of 
the seas. Unknown to themselves, Nelson and his 
fellow-admirals settled the fate of Australia, upon 



The English-Speaking Peoples 17 

which they probably never wasted a thought. 
Trafalgar decided much more than the mere ques- 
tion whether Great Britain should temporarily 
share the fate that so soon befell Prussia; for in 
all probability it decided the destiny of the island- 
continent that lay in the South Seas. 

The history of the English-speaking race in 
America has been widely different. In Australia 
there was no fighting whatever, whether with na- 
tives or with other foreigners. In America for the 
past two centuries and a half there has been a con- 
stant succession of contests with powerful and 
warlike native tribes, with rival European nations, 
and with American nations of European origin. 
But even in America there have been wide differ- 
ences in the way the work has had to be done in 
different parts of the country, since the close of the 
great colonial contests between England, France, 
and Spain. 

The extension of the English, westward through 
Canada, since the War of the Revolution has been 
in its essential features merely a less important 
repetition of what has gone on in the northern 
United States. The gold miner, the trans-con- 
tinental railway, and the soldier have been the 
pioneers of civilization. The chief point of differ- 
ence, which was but small, arose from the fact that 
the whole of western Canada was for a long time 
under the control of the most powerful of all the 



VOL. I. — 2. 



i8 The Winning of the West 

fur companies, in whose employ were very many 
French voyageurs and coureurs des bois. From 
these there sprang up in the valleys of the Red 
River and the Saskatchewan a singular race of 
half-breeds, with a unique semi-civilization of 
their own. It was with these half-breeds, and 
not, as in the United States, with the Indians, 
that the settlers of northwestern Canada had 
their main difficulties. 

In what now forms the United States, taking 
the country as a whole, the foes who had to be met 
and overcome were very much more formidable. 
The ground had to be not only settled but con- 
quered, sometimes at the expense of the natives, 
often at the expense of rival European races. As 
already pointed out, the Indians themselves 
formed one of the main factors in deciding the fate 
of the continent. They were never able in the 
end to avert the white conquest, but they could 
often delay its advance for a long spell of years. 
The Iroquois, for instance, held their own against 
all comers for two centuries. Many other tribes 
stayed for a time the oncoming white flood, or 
even drove it back ; in Maine, the settlers were for 
a hundred years confined to a narrow strip of sea- 
coast. Against the Spaniards, there were even 
here and there Indian nations who definitely re- 
covered the ground they had lost. 

When the whites first landed, the superiority and, 



The English-Speaking Peoples 19 

above all, the novelty of their arms gave them 
a very great advantage. But the Indians soon 
became accustomed to the new-comers' weapons 
and style of warfare. By the time the English had 
consolidated the Atlantic colonies under their rule, 
the Indians had become what they have remained 
ever since, the most formidable savage foes ever 
encountered by colonists of European stock. Rel- 
atively to their numbers, they have shown them- 
selves far more to be dreaded than the Zulus or 
even the Maoris. 

Their presence has caused the process of settle- 
ment to go on at unequal rates of speed in different 
places ; the flood has been hemmed in at one point, 
or has been forced to flow round an island of 
native population at another. Had the Indians 
been as helpless as the native Australians were, 
the continent of North America would have had 
an altogether different history. It would not only 
have been settled far more rapidly, but also on 
very different lines. Not only have the red men 
themselves kept back the settlements, but they 
have also had a very great effect upon the out- 
come of the struggles between the different in- 
trusive European peoples. Had the original 
inhabitants of the Mississippi valley been as nu- 
merous and unwarlike as the Aztecs, De Soto would 
have repeated the work of Cortes, and we would 
very possibly have been barred out of the greater 



20 The Winning of the West 

portion of our present domain. Had it not been 
for their Indian allies, it would have been impos- 
sible for the French to prolong, as they did, their 
struggle with their much more numerous English 
neighbors. 

The Indians have shrunk back before our ad- 
vance only after fierce and dogged resistance. 
They were never numerous in the land, but exactly 
what their numbers were when the whites first ap- 
peared is impossible to tell. Probably an estimate 
of half a million for those within the limits of the 
present United States is not far wrong ; but in any 
such calculation there is of necessity a large ele- 
ment of mere rough guess-work. Formerly writ- 
ers greatly overestimated their original numbers, 
counting them by millions. Now it is the fashion 
to go to the other extreme, and even to maintain 
they have not decreased at all. This last is a 
theory that can only be upheld on the supposition 
that the whole does not consist of the sum of the 
parts ; for whereas we can check off on our fingers 
the tribes that have slightly increased, we can enu- 
merate scores that have died out almost before our 
eyes. Speaking broadly, they have mixed but 
little with the English (as distinguished from the 
French and Spanish) invaders. They are driven 
back, or die out, or retire to their own reserva- 
tions; but they are not often assimilated. Still, 
on every frontier, there is always a certain amount 



The English-Speaking Peoples 21 

of assimilation going on, much more than is 
commonly admitted ' ; and whenever a French or 
Spanish community has been absorbed by the ener- 
getic Americans, a certain amount of Indian blood 
has been absorbed also. There seems to be a 
chance that in one part of our country, the Indian 
Territory, the Indians, who are continually ad- 
vancing in civilization, will remain as the ground 
element of the population, like the Creoles in 
Louisiana, or the Mexicans in New Mexico. 

The Americans, when they became a nation, con- 
tinued even more successfully the work which they 
had begun as citizens of the several English col- 
onies. At the outbreak of the Revolution they 
still all dwelt on the seaboard, either on the coast 
itself or along the banks of the streams flowing 
into the Atlantic. When the fight at Lexington 
took place they had no settlements beyond the 
mountain chain on our western border. It had 
taken them over a century and a half to spread 

^ To this I can testify of my own knowledge as regards 
Montana, Dakota, and Minnesota. The mixture usually 
takes place in the ranks of the population where individuals 
lose all trace of their ancestry after two or three generations; 
so it is often honestly ignored, and sometimes mention of it 
is suppressed, the man regarding it as a taint. But I also 
know many very wealthy old frontiersmen whose half-breed 
children are now being educated, generally at convent schools 
while in the northwestern cities I covild point out some very 
charming men and women, in the best society, with a strain 
of Indian blood in their veins. 



22 The Winning of the West 

from the Atlantic to the Alleghanies. In the next 
three quarters of a century they spread from the 
Alleghanies to the Pacific. In doing this they not 
only dispossessed the Indian tribes, but they also 
won the land from its European owners. Britain 
had to yield the territory between the Ohio and 
the Great Lakes. By a purchase, of which we 
frankly announced that the alternative would be 
war, we acquired from France the vast, ill-defined 
region known as Louisiana. From the Spaniards, 
or from their descendants, we won the lands of 
Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and California. 

All these lands were conquered after we had be- 
come a power, independent of every other, and one 
within our own borders — when we were no longer 
a loose assemblage of petty seaboard communities, 
each with only such relationship to its neighbor as 
was implied in their common subjection to a for- 
eign king and a foreign people. Moreover, it is 
well always to remember that at the day when we 
began our career as a nation we already differed 
from our kinsmen of Britain in blood as well as in 
name ; the word American already had more than 
a merely geographical signification. Americans 
belong to the English race only in the sense in 
which Englishmen belong to the German. The 
fact that no change of language has accompanied 
the second wandering of our people, from Britain 
to America, as it accompanied their first, from 



The English-Speaking Peoples 23 

Germany to Britain, is due to the further fact 
that when the second wandering took place the 
race possessed a fixed Uterary language, and, 
thanks to the ease of communication, was kept 
in touch with the parent stock. The change of 
blood was probably as great in one case as in the 
other. The modem Englishman is descended 
from a Low-Dutch stock, which, when it went to 
Britain, received into itself an enormous infusion 
of Celtic, a much smaller infusion of Norse and 
Danish, and also a certain infusion of Norman- 
French blood. When this new English stock 
came to America it mingled with and absorbed 
into itself immigrants from many European lands, 
and the process has gone on ever since. It is to 
be noted that, of the new blood thus acquired, the 
greatest proportion has come from the Dutch and 
German sources, and the next greatest from Irish, 
while the Scandinavian element comes third, and 
the only other of much consequence is French 
Huguenot. Thus it appears that no new element 
of importance has been added to the blood. Ad- 
ditions have been made to the elemental race- 
strains in much the same proportion as these were 
originally combined. 

Some latter-day writers deplore the enormous 
immigration to our shores as making us a hetero- 
geneous instead of a homogeneous people ; but as 
a matter of fact we are less heterogeneous at the 



24 The Winning of the West 

present day than we were at the outbreak of the 
Revolution. Our blood was as much mixed a 
century ago as it is now. No State now has a 
smaller proportion of English blood than New 
York or Pennsylvania had in 1775. Even in 
New England, where the English stock is the 
purest, there was a certain French and Irish mix- 
ture; in Virginia there were Germans in addi- 
tion. In the other colonies, taken as a whole, it 
is not probable that much over half of the blood 
was English ; Dutch, French, German, and Gaelic 
communities abounded. 

But all were being rapidly fused into one peo- 
ple. As the Celt of Cornwall and the Saxon of 
Wessex are now alike Englishmen, so in 1775 Hol- 
lander and Huguenot, whether in New York or 
South Carolina, had become Americans, undistin- 
guishable from the NewEnglanders and Virginians, 
the descendants of the men who followed Crom- 
well or charged behind Rupert. When the great 
western movement began we were already a people 
by ourselves. Moreover, the immense immigra- 
tion from Europe that has taken place since had 
little or no effect on the way in which we extended 
our boundaries; it only began to be important 
about the time when we acquired our present 
limits. These limits would in all probability be 
what they are now even if we had not received a 
single European colonist since the Revolution. 



The English-Speaking Peoples 25 

Thus the Americans began their work of western 
conquest as a separate and individual people, at 
the moment when they sprang into national life. 
It has been their great work ever since. All 
other questions, save those of the preservation of 
the Union itself and of the emancipation of the 
blacks, have been of subordinate importance when 
compared with the great question of how rapidly 
and how completely they were to subjugate that 
part of their continent lying between the eastern 
mountains and the Pacific. Yet the statesmen of 
the Atlantic seaboard were often unable to per- 
ceive this, and indeed frequently showed the same 
narrow jealousy of the communities beyond the 
Alleghanies that England felt for all America. 
Even if they were too broad-minded and far-see- 
ing to feel thus, they yet were unable to fully ap- 
preciate the magnitude of the interests at stake in 
the West. They thought more of our right to the 
North Atlantic fisheries than of our ownership of 
the Mississippi valley ; they were more interested 
in the fate of a bank or a tariff than in the settle- 
ment of the Oregon boundary. Most contem- 
porary writers showed similar shortcomings in 
their sense of historic perspective. The names of 
Ethan Allen and ]\Iarion are probably better 
known than is that of George Rogers Clark; yet 
their deeds, as regards their effects, could no more 
be compared to his, than his could be compared 



26 The Winning of the West 

to Washington's. So it was with Houston. Dur- 
ing his hfetime there were probably fifty men who, 
east of the Mississippi, were deemed far greater 
than he was. Yet in most cases their names have 
already almost faded from remembrance, while his 
fame will grow steadily brighter as the importance 
of his deeds is more thoroughly realized. For- 
tunately, in the long nm, the mass of Easterners 
always backed up their western brethem. 

The kind of colonizing conquest, whereby the 
people of the United States have extended their 
borders, has much in common with the similar 
movements in Canada and Australia, all of them 
standing in sharp contrast to what has gone on in 
Spanish-American lands. But, of course, each is 
marked out in addition by certain peculiarities of 
its own. Moreover, even in the United States, 
the movement falls naturally into two divisions, 
which on several points differ widely from each 
other. 

The way in which the southern part of our 
western country — that is, all the land south of the 
Ohio, and from thence on to the Rio Grande and 
the Pacific — was won and settled, stands quite 
alone. The region north of it was filled up in a 
very different manner. The Southwest, includ- 
ing therein what was once called simply the West, 
and afterwards the Middle West, was won by the 
people themselves, acting as individuals, or as 



The English-Speaking Peoples 27 

groups of individuals, who hewed out their own 
fortunes in advance of any governmental action. 
On the other hand, the Northwest, speaking 
broadly, was acquired by the government, the set- 
tlers merely taking possession of what the whole 
country guaranteed them. The Northwest is es- 
sentially a national domain; it is fitting that it 
should be, as it is, not only by position but also 
by feeling, the heart of the nation. 

North of the Ohio the regular army went first. 
The settlements grew up behind the shelter of the 
federal troops of Harmar, St. Claire, and Wayne, 
and of their successors even to our own day. The 
wars in which the borderers themselves bore any 
part w^ere few and trifling compared to the con- 
tests waged by the adventurers who won Ken- 
tucky, Tennessee, and Texas. 

In the Southwest the early settlers acted as 
their own army, and supplied both leaders and 
men. Sevier, Robertson, Clark, and Boon led their 
fellow-pioneers to battle, as Jackson did after- 
wards, and as Houston did later still. Indeed the 
Southwesterners not only won their own soil for 
themselves, but they were the chief instruments 
in the original acquisition of the Northwest also. 
Had it not been for the conquest of the Illinois 
towns in 1779 we would probably never have had 
any Northwest to settle; and the huge tract be- 
tween the upper Mississippi and the Columbia, 



28 The Winning of the West 

then called Upper Louisiana, fell into our hands 
only because the Kentuckians and Tennesseeans 
were resolutely bent on taking possession of New 
Orleans, either by bargain or battle. All of our 
ten-itory lying beyond the Alleghanies, north and 
south, was first won for us by the Southwesterners, 
fighting for their own hand. The northern part 
was afterwards filled up by the thrifty, vigorous 
men of the Northeast, whose sons became the real 
rulers as well as the preservers of the Union ; but 
these settlements of Northerners were rendered 
possible only by the deeds of the nation as a 
whole. They entered on land that the Southern- 
ers had won, and they were kept there by the 
strong arm of the Federal Government; whereas 
the Southerners owed most of their victories only 
to themselves. 

The first-comers around Marietta did, it is 
true, share to a certain extent in the dangers of 
the existing Indian wars ; but their trials are not 
to be mentioned beside those endured by the early 
settlers of Tennessee and Kentucky, and whereas 
these latter themselves subdued and drove out 
their foes, the former took but an insignificant part 
in the contest by which the possession of their land 
was secured. Besides, the strongest and most 
numerous Indian tribes were in the Southwest. 

The Southwest developed its civilization on its 
own lines, for good and for ill ; the Northwest was 



The English-Speaking Peoples 29 

settled under the national ordinance of 1787, which 
absolutely determined its destiny, and thereby 
in the end also determined the destiny of the 
whole nation. Moreover, the Gulf coast, as well as 
the interior, from the Mississippi to the Pacific, was 
held by foreign powers; while in the north this 
was only true of the country between the Ohio and 
the Great Lakes during the first years of the Revo- 
lution, until the Kentucky backwoodsmen con- 
quered it. Our rivals of European race had dwelt 
for generations along the lower Mississippi and the 
Rio Grande, in Florida, and in California, when we 
made them ours. Detroit, Vincennes, St. Louis, 
and New Orleans, St. Augustine, San Antonio, 
Santa F6, and San Francisco are cities that were 
built by Frenchmen or Spaniards; we did not 
found them, but conquered them. All but the 
first two are in the Southwest, and of these two, 
one was first taken and governed by Southwestem- 
ers. On the other hand, the northwestern cities, 
from Cincinnati and Chicago to Helena and Port- 
land, were founded by our own people, by the peo- 
ple who now have possession of them. 

The Southwest was conquered only after years 
of hard fighting with the original owners. The 
way in which this was done bears much less resem- 
blance to the sudden filling up of Australia and 
California by the practically unopposed overflow 
from a teeming and civilized mother-country, than 



30 The Winninof of the West 



tj 



it does to the original English conquest of Britain 
itself. The warlike borderers who thronged across 
the Alleghanies, the restless and reckless hunters, 
the hard, dogged, frontier farmers, by dint of grim 
tenacity, overcame and displaced Indians, French, 
and Spaniards alike, exactly as, fourteen hundred 
years before, Saxon and Angle had overcome and 
displaced the Cymric and Gaelic Celts. They were 
led by no one commander ; they acted under orders 
from neither king nor congress ; they were not car- 
rying out the plans of any far-sighted leader. In 
obedience to the instincts working half blindly 
within their breasts, spurred ever onwards by the 
fierce desires of their eager hearts, they made in the 
wilderness homes for their children, and by so do- 
ing wrought out the destinies of a continental na- 
tion. They warred and settled from the high 
hill-valleys of the French Broad and the upper 
Cumberland to the half-tropical basin of the Rio 
Grande, and to where the Golden Gate lets through 
the long-heaving waters of the Pacific. The story 
of how this was done forms a compact and contin- 
uous whole. The fathers followed Boon or fought 
at King's Mountain ; the sons marched south with 
Jackson to overcome the Creeks and beat back the 
British ; the grandsons died at the Alamo or charged 
to victory at San Jacinto. They were doing their 
share of a work that began with the conquest of 
Britain, that entered on its second and wider pe- 



The English-Speaking Peoples 3^ 

riod after the defeat of the Spanish Armada, that 
culminated in the marvellous growth of the United 
States. The winning of the West and Southwest 
is a stage in the conquest of a continent. 



CHAPTER II 

THE FRENCH OF THE OHIO VALLEY, 1763-1775 

THE result of England's last great colonial 
struggle with France was to sever from the 
latter all her American dependencies, her 
colonists becoming the subjects of alien and rival 
powers. England won Canada and the Ohio val- 
ley ; while France ceded to her Spanish allies Lou- 
isiana, including therein all the territory vaguely 
bounded by the Mississippi and the Pacific. As an 
offset to this gain, Spain had herself lost to Eng- 
land both Floridas, as the coast regions between 
Georgia and Louisiana were then called. 

Thus the thirteen colonies, at the outset of their 
struggle for independence, saw themselves sur- 
rounded, north, south, and west, by lands where 
the rulers and the ruled were of different races, 
but where rulers and ruled alike were hostile to 
the new people that was destined in the end to 
master them all. 

The present Province of Quebec, then called 
Canada, was already, what she has to this day re- 
mained, a French state acknowledging the Eng- 
lish king as her over-lord. Her interests did not 

32 



The Ohio Valley French 33 

conflict with those of our people, nor touch them 
in any way, and she has had httle to do with our 
national history, and nothing whatever to do with 
the history of the West. 

In the peninsula of East Florida, in the land 
of the cypress, palmetto, and live oak, of open sa- 
vannas, of sandy pine forests, and impenetrable, 
interminable morasses, a European civilization 
more ancient than any in the English colonies 
was mouldering in slow decay. Its capital city was 
quaint St. Augustine, the old walled town that was 
founded by the Spaniards long years before the 
keel of the Half -Moon furrowed the broad Hudson, 
or the ships of the Puritans sighted the New Eng- 
land coast. In times past St. Augustine had once 
and again seen her harbor filled with the huge, 
cumbrous hulls, and whitened by the bellying sails, 
of the Spanish war vessels, when the fleets of the 
Catholic king gathered there, before setting out 
against the seaboard towns of Georgia and the 
Carolinas ; and she had to suffer from and repulse 
the retaliatory inroads of the English colonists. 
Once her priests and soldiers had brought the In- 
dian tribes, far and near, under subjection, and had 
dotted the wilderness with fort and church and 
plantation, the outposts of her dominion ; but that 
was long ago, and the tide of Spanish success had 
turned and begun to ebb many years before the 
English took possession of Florida. The Seminoles, 

VOL. I.— 3. 



34 The Winning of the West 

jfierce and warlike, whose warriors fought on 
foot and on horseback, had avenged in countless 
bloody forays their fellow-Indian tribes, whose 
very names had perished under Spanish rule. The 
churches and forts had crumbled into nothing ; 
only the cannon and the brazen bells, half buried 
in the rotting mould, remained to mark the place 
where once stood spire and citadel. The deserted 
plantations, the untravelled causeways, no longer 
marred the face of the tree-clad land, for even their 
sites had ceased to be distinguishable ; the great 
high-road that led to Pensacola had faded away, 
overgrown by the rank luxuriance of the semi- 
tropical forest. Throughout the interior the painted 
savages roved at will, uncontrolled by Spaniard or 
Englishman, owing allegiance only to the White 
Chief of Tallasotchee.' St. Augustine, with its 
British garrison and its Spanish and Minorcan 
townsfolk,^ was still a gathering-place for a few 
Indian traders, and for the scattered fishermen 
of the coast ; elsewhere there were in all not more 
than a hundred families. ^ 

^ Travels by William Bartram, Philadelphia, 1791, pp. 184, 
231, 232, etc. The various Indian names are spelled in a 
dozen different ways. 

^ Reise, etc. (in 1783 and 1784), by Johann David Schopf, 
1788, ii., 362. The Minorcans were the most numerous and 
prosperous; then came the Spaniards, with a few Creoles, 
En,c;lish, and Germans. 

3 J. D. F. Smyth, Tour in the United States (1775), London, 
I7''^4. ii-. 35- 



The Ohio Valley French 35 

Beyond the Chattahooche and the Appalachi- 
cola, stretching thence to the Mississippi and its 
delta, lay the more prosperous region of West 
Florida/ Although taken by the English from 
Spain, there were few Spaniards among the people, 
who were controlled by the scanty British garri- 
sons at Pensacola, Mobile, and Natchez. On the 
Gulf coast the inhabitants were mainly French Cre- 
oles. They were an indolent, pleasure-loving race, 
fond of dancing and merriment, living at ease in 
their low, square, roomy houses on the straggling, 
rudely farmed plantations that lay along the river 
banks. Their black slaves worked for them ; they 
themselves spent much of their time in fishing and 
fowling. Their favorite arm was the light fowl- 
ing-piece, for they were expert wing shots ^ ; un- 
like the American backwoodsman, who knew 
nothing of shooting on the wing, and looked down 
on smooth-bores, caring only for the rifle, the true 
weapon of the freeman. In winter, the Creoles 
took their negroes to the hills, where they made 
tar from the pitch pine, and this they exported, as 
well as indigo, rice, tobacco, bear's oil, peltry, 

I Ibid. 

* Mhnoire ou Coup-d'CEil Rapide sur mes differenies voyages 
et mon sejoiir dans la nation Creek, par Le Gal. Milfort, Tas- 
tan^gy ou grand chef de guerre de la nation Creek et General de 
Brigade an service de la Republique Frangaise, Paris, 1802. 
Writing in 1781, he said Mobile contained abottt forty pro- 
prietary families, and was un petit paradis tcrrestre. 



36 The Winning of the West 

oranges, and squared timber. Cotton was grown, 
but only for home use. The British soldiers dwelt 
in stockaded forts, mounting light cannon; the 
governor lived in the high stone castle built of old 
by the Spaniards at Pensacola.^ 

In the part of West Florida lying along the east 
bank of the Mississippi, there were also some 
French Creoles and a few Spaniards, with, of course, 
negroes and Indians to boot. But the population 
consisted mainly of Americans from the old colo- 
nies, who had come thither by sea in small sailing 
vessels, or had descended the Ohio and the Tennes- 
see in flat-boats, or, perchance, had crossed the 
Creek country with pack-ponies, following the nar- 
row trails of the Indian traders. With them were 
some English and Scotch, and the Americans them- 
selves had little sympathy with the colonies, feel- 
ing, instead, a certain dread and dislike of the 
rough Carolinian mountaineers, who were their 
nearest white neighbors on the east.^ They there- 
fore, for the most part, remained loyal to the 
crown in the Revolutionary struggle, and suffered 
accordingly. 

When Louisiana was ceded to Spain, most of the 
French Creoles who formed her population were 
clustered together in the delta of the Mississippi ; 

* Bartram, 407. 

^ Magazine of American History, iv., 388. Letter of a New 
England settler in 1773. 



The Ohio Valley French 37 

the rest were scattered out here and there, in a 
thin, dotted Hne, up the left bank of the river to 
the Missouri, near the mouth of which there were 
several small villages : St. Louis, St. Genevieve, 
St. Charles.^ A strong Spanish garrison held 
New Orleans, where the Creoles, discontented 
with their new masters, had once risen in a re- 
volt that was speedily quelled and severely 
punished. Small garrisons were also placed in 
the different villages. 

Our people had little to do with either Florida or 
Louisiana until after the close of the Revolutionary 
War; but very early in that struggle, and soon 
after the movement west of the mountains began, 
we were thrown into contact with the French of 
the Northwestern Territory, and the result was of 
the utmost importance to the future welfare of the 
whole nation. 

This northwestern land lay between the Mis- 
sissippi, the Ohio, and the Great Lakes. It now 
constitutes five of our large States and part of a 
sixth. But when independence was declared it 
was quite as much a foreign territory, considered 
from the standpoint of the old thirteen colonies, 
as Florida or Canada; the difference was that, 
whereas during the war we failed in our attempts 
to conquer Florida and Canada, we succeeded 

^ Annals of St. Louis, Frederic L. Billon, St. Louis, iS86. 
A valuable book. 



3^ The Winning of the West 

in conquering the Northwest. The Northwest 
formed no part of our country as it originally 
stood ; it had no portion in the Declaration of In- 
dependence. It did not revolt ; it was conquered. 
Its inhabitants, at the outset of the Revolution, 
no more sympathized with us, and felt no greater 
inclination to share our fate, than did their kins- 
men in Quebec or the Spaniards in St. Augustine. 
We made our first important conquest during the 
Revolution itself, — beginning thus early what was 
to be our distinguishing work for the next seventy 
years. 

These French settlements, which had been 
founded about the beginning of the century, when 
the English still clung to the estuaries of the sea- 
board, were grouped in three clusters, separated 
by hundreds of miles of wilderness. One of these 
clusters, containing something like a third of the 
total population, was at the straits, around De- 
troit.^ It was the seat of the British power in that 

* In the Haldimand MSS., Series B, vol. cxxii., p. 2, is a 
census of Detroit itself, taken in 1773 by Philip Dejean, jus- 
tice of the peace. According to this there were 1367 souls, of 
whom 85 were slaves; they dwelt in 280 houses, with 157 
barns, and owned 1494 homed cattle, 628 sheep, and 1067 
hogs. Acre is used as a measure of length; their united 
farms had a frontage of 512, and went back from 40 to 80. 
Some of the people, it is specified, were not enumerated be- 
cause they were out hunting or trading at the Indian villages. 
Besides the slaves, there were 93 servants. 

This only refers to the settlers of Detroit proper, and the 



The Ohio Valley French 39 

section, and remained in British hands for twenty- 
years after we had become a nation. 

The other two were Hnked together by their sub- 
sequent history, and it is only with them that we 
have to deal. The village of Vincennes lay on the 
eastern bank of the Wabash, with two or three 
smaller villages tributary to it in the country round 
about ; and to the west, beside the Mississippi, far 
above where it is joined by the Ohio, lay the so- 
called Ilhnois towns, the villages of Kaskaskia and 
Cahokia, with between them the little settlements 
of Prairie du Rocher and St. Philip. ' 

Both these groups of old French hamlets were 
in the fertile prairie region of what is now southern 
Indiana and Illinois. We have taken into our lan- 
guage the word prairie, because when our back- 
woodsmen first reached the land and saw the great 
natural meadows of long grass — sights unknown to 
the gloomy forests wherein they had always dwelt 
— they knew not what to call them, and borrowed 
the term already in use among the French inhab- 
itants. 

farms adjoining. Of the numerous other farms, and the 
small villac^es on both sides of the straits, and of the many 
families and individuals living as traders or trappers with the 
Indians, I can get no good record. Perhaps the total popula- 
tion tributary to Detroit was 2000. It may have been over 
this. Any attempt to estimate this Creole population per- 
force contains much guess-work. 

^ State Department MSS., No. 150, vol. iii., p. 89. 



40 The Winning of the West 

The great prairies, level or rolling, stretched 
from north to south, separated by broad belts of 
high timber. Here and there copses of woodland 
lay like islands in the sunny seas of tall, waving 
grass. Where the rivers ran, their alluvial bot- 
toms were densely covered with trees and under- 
brush, and were often overflowed in the spring 
freshets. Sometimes the prairies were long, nar- 
row strips of meadow land; again, they were so 
broad as to be a day's journey across, and to 
the American, bred in a wooded country where the 
largest openings were the beaver meadows and the 
clearings of the frontier settlers, the stretches of 
grassland seemed limitless. They abounded in 
game. The buft'alo crossed and recrossed them, 
wandering to and fro in long files, beating narrow 
trails that they followed year in and year out; 
while bear, elk, and deer dwelt in the groves around 
the borders.^ 

There were perhaps some four thousand inhab- 
itants in these French villages, divided almost 
equally between those in the Illinois and those 
along the Wabash.^ 

'^ Ibid., Harmar's letter. 

^ State Department MSS., No. 30, p. 453. Memorial of 
Franfois Carbonneaux, agent for the inhabitants of the Illi- 
nois country, Deeembcr 8, 1784. "Four hundred families 
[in tlic Illinois] exclusive of a like number at Post Vincent " 
[Vinccnncs]. Americans had then just begun to come in, but 
this enumeration did not refer to them. The population had 



The Ohio Valley French 41 

The country came into the possession of the 
British — not of the colonial EngHsh or Americans 
— at the close of Pontiac's war, the aftermath of 
the struggle which decided against the French the 
ownership of America. It was held as a new Brit- 
ish province, not as an extension of any of the old 

decreased during the Revolutionary War; so that at its out- 
break there were probably altogether a thousand families. 
They were very prolific, and four to a family is probably not 
too great an allowance, even when we consider that in such a 
community on the frontier there are always plenty of solitary 
adventurers. Moreover, there were a number of negro slaves. 
Harmar's letter of November 24, 1787, states the adult males 
of Kaskaskia and Cahokia at four hundred and forty, not 
counting those at St. Philip or Prairie du Rocher. This 
tallies very well with the preceding. But of course the num- 
ber given can only be considered approximately accurate, 
and a passage in a letter of Lieutenant-Governor Hamilton 
would indicate that it was considerably smaller. 

This letter is to be foimd in the Haldimand MSS., Series B, 
vol. cxxiii.,p. 53; it is the " brief account " of his ill-starred ex- 
pedition against Vincennes. He says: "On taking an accoimt 
of the Inhabitants of this place [Vincennes], of all ages and 
sexes, we found their number to amotmt to 621; of this 217 
fit to bear arms on the spot, several being absent hunting 
Buff aloe for their winter provision." But elsewhere in the 
same letter he alludes to the adult arms-bearing men as 
being three hundred in number, and of course the outlying 
fanns and small tributary villages are not counted in. This 
was in December, 1778. Possibly some families had left for 
the Spanish possessions after the war broke out, and re- 
turned after it was ended. But as all observers seem to unite 
in stating that the settlements either stood still or went back- 
wards during the Revolutionary struggle, it is somewhat 
diflicult to reconcile the figures of Hamilton and Carbonneaux. 



42 The Winning of the West 

colonies; and finally, in 1774, by the famous Que- 
bec Act, it was rendered an appanage of Canada, 
governed from the latter. It is a curious fact that 
England immediately adopted towards her own 
colonists the policy of the very nationality she had 
ousted. From the date of the triumphant peace 
won by Wolfe's victory, the British government 
became the most active foe of the spread of the 
English race in America. This position Britain 
maintained for many years after the failure of her 
attempt to bar her colonists out of the Ohio valley. 
It was the position she occupied when at Ghent in 
1 8 14 her commissioners tried to hem in the natural 
progress of her colonists' children by the erection 
of a great "neutral belt" of Indian territory, guar- 
anteed by the British king. It was the role which 
her statesmen endeavored to make her play when, 
at a later date, they strove to keep Oregon a waste 
rather than see it peopled by Americans. 

In the Northwest she succeeded to the French 
policy as well as the French position. She wished 
the land to remain a wilderness, the home of the 
trapper and the fur trader, of the Indian hunter 
and the French voyageur. She desired it to be 
kept as a barrier against the growth of the seaboard 
colonies towards the interior. She regarded the 
new lands across the Atlantic as being won and 
settled, not for the benefit of the men who won and 
settled them, but for the benefit of the merchants 



The Ohio Valley French 43 

and traders who stayed at home. It was this 
that rendered the Revolution inevitable; the 
struggle was a revolt against the whole mental atti- 
tude of Britain in regard to America, rather than 
against any one special act or set of acts. The sins 
and shortcomings of the colonists had been many, 
and it would be easy to make out a formidable 
catalogue of grievances against them, on behalf of 
the mother-country ; but on the great underlying 
question they were wholly in the right, and their 
success was of vital consequence to the well-being 
of the race on this continent. 

Several of the old colonies urged vague claims to 
parts of the Northwestern Territory, basing them 
on ancient charters and Indian treaties; but the 
British heeded them no more than the French had, 
and they were very little nearer fulfilment after the 
defeat of Montcalm and Pontiac than before. The 
French had held adverse possession in spite of 
them for sixty years ; the British held similar pos- 
session for fifteen more. The mere statement of 
the facts is enough to show the intrinsic worthless- 
ness of the titles. The Northwest was acquired 
from France by Great Britain through conquest 
and treaty ; in a precisely similar way — Clark tak- 
ing the place of Wolfe — it was afterwards won from 
Britain by the United States. We gained it exactly 
as we afterwards gained Louisiana, Florida, Ore- 
gon, California, New Mexico, and Texas — partly by 



44 The Winning of the West 

arms, partly by diplomacy, partly by the sheer 
growth and pressure of our spreading population. 
The fact that the conquest took place just after 
we had declared ourselves a free nation, and while 
we were still battling to maintain our independ- 
ence, does not alter its character in the least ; but 
it has sufficed to render the whole transaction very 
hazy in the minds of most subsequent historians, 
who generally speak as if the Northwest Territory 
had been part of our original possessions. 

The French who dwelt in the land were at the 
time little affected by the change which trans- 
ferred their allegiance from one European king to 
another. They were accustomed to obey, without 
question, the orders of their superiors. They ac- 
cepted the results of the war submissively, and 
yielded a passive obedience to their new rulers.^ 
Some became rather attached to the officers 
who came among them; others grew rather to 
dislike them; most felt merely a vague sen- 
timent of distrust and repulsion, alike for the 
haughty British officer in his scarlet uniform, and 
for the reckless backwoodsman clad in tattered 
homespun or buckskin. They remained the own- 

" In the Haldimand MSS., Scries B, vol. cxxii., p. 3, the 
letter of M. Ste. Marie from Vinccnnes, May 3, 1774, gives 
utterance to the general feeling of the Creoles, when he an- 
nounces, in promising in their behalf to carry out the orders 
of the British commandant, that he is remplie de respect pour 
tout ce qui porte I'emprinie de I'otorite [sic/]. 



The Ohio Valley French 45 

ers of the villages, the tillers of the soil. At first 
few English or American immigrants, save an oc- 
casional fur trader, came to live among them. 
But their doom was assured ; their rule was at an 
end forever. For a while they were still to com- 
pose the bulk of the scanty population; but no- 
where were they again to sway their own destinies. 
In after years they fought for and against both 
whites and Indians ; they faced each other, ranged 
beneath the rival banners of Spain, England, and 
the insurgent colonists; but they never again 
fought for their old flag or for their own sov- 
ereignty. 

From the overthrow of Pontiac to the outbreak 
of the Revolution, the settlers in the Ilhnois and 
round Vincennes lived in peace under their old 
laws and customs, which were continued by the 
British commandants.^ They had been originally 
governed, in the same way that Canada was, by 
the laws of France, adapted, however, to the 
circumstances of the new country. Moreover, 
they had local customs which were as binding as 
the laws. After the conquest the British com- 
mandants who came in acted as civil judges also. 
All public transactions were recorded in French 
by notaries public. Orders issued in English 

^ State Department MSS., No. 48. p. 51. Statement 
of M. Cerre (or Carre), July, 1786, translated by John Pin- 
tard. 



46 The Winning of the West 

were translated into French so that they might be 
understood. Criminal cases were referred to Eng- 
land. Before the conquest the procureur du roi 
gave sentence by his own personal decision in civil 
cases; if the matters were important, it was the 
custom for each party to name two arbitrators, 
and the procureur du roi a fifth ; while an appeal 
might be made to the conseil superieiir at New Or- 
leans. The British commandant assumed the 
place of the procureur du roi, although there were 
one or two half-hearted efforts made to introduce 
the Common Law. 

The original French commandants had exercised 
the power of granting to every person who peti- 
tioned as much land as the petitioner chose to ask 
for, subject to the condition that part of it should 
be cultivated within a year, under penalty of its 
reversion to "the king's demesnes." ' The Eng- 
lish followed the same custom. A large quantity 
of land was reserved in the neighborhood of each 
village for the common use, and a very small quan- 
tity for religious purposes. The common was gen- 
erally a large patch of enclosed prairie, part of it 
being cultivated, and the remainder serving as a 
pasture for the cattle of the inhabitants.^ The 
portion of the common set aside for agriculture 

» Ihid. 

^ Ibid., p. 41. Petition of J. B. La Croix, A. Girardin, etc., 
dated "at Cohoe in the Illinois 15II1 July, 1786." 



The Ohio Valley French 47 

was divided into strips of one arpent in front by 
forty in depth, and one or more allotted to each 
inhabitant according to his skill and industry as a 
cultivator." The arpent, as used by the western 
French, was a rather rough measure of surface, 
less in size than an acre.^ The farms held by pri- 
vate ownership likewise ran back in long strips 
from a narrow front that usually lay along some 
stream.3 Several of them generally lay'parallel to 
one another, each including something like a hun- 
dred acres, but occasionally much exceeding this 
amount. 

The French inhabitants were in very many cases 
not of pure blood. The early settlements had been 
made by men only — by soldiers, traders, and trap- 
pers, who took Indian wives. They were not tram- 
melled by the queer pride which makes a man of 
English stock unwilling to make a red-skinned 
woman his wife, though anxious enough to make 
her his concubine. Their children were baptized 
in the little parish churches by the black-robed 
priests, and grew up holding the same position in 
the community as was held by their fellows, both 
of whose parents were white. But, in addition to 
these free citizens, the richer inhabitants owned 

" Billon, 91. 

* An arpent of land was i8o French feet square. MS. copy 
of Joiirnal of Matthew Clarkson in 1766. In Durrett collec- 
tion. 

3 American State Papers, Public Lands, i., 11. 



48 The Winnini>- of the West 



t> 



both red and black slaves ; negroes imported from 
Africa, or Indians overcome and taken in battle.^ 
There were many freedmen and freedwomen of 
both colors, and, in consequence, much mixture of 
blood. 

They were tillers of the soil, and some followed, 
in addition, the trades of blacksmith and carpenter. 
Very many of them were trappers or fur traders. 
Their money was composed of furs and peltries, 
rated at a fixed price per pound ^ ; none other was 
used unless expressly so stated in the contract. 
Like the French of Europe, their unit of value was 
the livre, nearly equivalent to the modem franc. 
They were not very industrious, nor very thrifty 
husbandmen. Their farming implements were 
rude, their methods of cultivation simple and prim- 
itive, and they themselves were often lazy and 
improvident. Near their town they had great 
orchards of gnarled apple-trees, planted by their 
forefathers when they came from France, and old 
pear-trees, of a kind unknown to the Americans; 
but their fields often lay untilled, while the owners 

' Fergus Historical Series, No. 12, Illinois in tJie iSth 
Century. Edward G. Mason, Chicago, 1881. A most excel- 
lent number of an excellent series. The old parish registers 
of Kaskaskia, going back to 1695, contain some remarkable 
names of the Indian mothers — such as Maria Aramipinchicoue 
and Domitilla Tchuigouanakigaboucoue. Sometimes the man 
is only distinguished by sonie such title as "The Parisian," 
or "The Bohemian." 

* Billon, 90. 



The Ohio Valley French 4.9 

lolled in the sunshine smoking their pipes. In 
consequence, they were sometimes brought to sore 
distress for food, being obliged to pluck their com 
while it was still green.'' 

The pursuits of the fur trader and fur trapper 
were far more congenial to them, and it was upon 
these that they chiefly depended. The half-sav- 
age life of toil, hardship, excitement, and long in- 
tervals of idleness attracted them strongly. This 
was perhaps one among the reasons why they got 
on so much better with the Indians than did the 
Americans, who, wherever they went, made clear- 
ings and settlements, cut down the trees, and 
drove off the game. 

But even these pursuits were followed under the 
ancient customs and usages of the country, leave 
to travel and trade being first obtained from the 
commandant ^ ; for the rule of the commandant 
was almost patriarchal. The inhabitants were 
utterly unacquainted with what the Americans 
called liberty. When they passed under our rule, 
it was soon found that it was impossible to make 
them understand such an institution as trial by 
jury ; they throve best under the form of govern- 
ment to which they had been immemorially accus- 
tomed — a commandant to give them orders, with 

^ Letter of P. A. Laforge, December 31, 1786. Billon, 268. 
2 State Department MSS., No. 1=50, vol. iii., p. 519. Letter 
of Joseph St. Marin, Avigust 23, 1788. 

VOL. I.— 4. 



50 The Winning of the West 

a few troops to back him up.' They often sought 
to escape from these orders, but rarely to defy 
them; their lawlessness was like the lawlessness 
of children and savages ; any disobedience was al- 
ways to a particular ordinance, not to the system. 
The trader having obtained his permit, built his 
boats, — whether light, roomy bateaux made of 
boards, or birch-bark canoes, or pirogues, which 
were simply hoUowed-out logs. He loaded them 
with paint, powder, bullets, blankets, beads, and 
rum, manned them with hardy voyageurs, trained 
all their lives in the use of pole and paddle, and 
started off up or down the Mississippi,^ the Ohio, or 
the Wabash, perhaps making a long carry or port- 
age over into the Great Lakes. It took him weeks, 
often months, to get to the first trading-point, 
usually some large winter encampment of Indians. 
He might visit several of these, or stay the whole 
winter through at one, buying the furs.^ Many 
of the French coureurs des hois, whose duty it was 
to traverse the wilderness, and who were expert 
trappers, took up their abode with the Indians, 
taught them how to catch the sable, fisher, 
otter, and beaver, and lived among them as 
members of the tribe, marrying copper-colored 
squaws, and rearing dusky children. When the 

' Ibid., p. 89. Hannar's letter. 

* Ibid., p. 519. Letter of Joseph St. Marin. 

^ Ibid., p. 89. 



The Ohio Valley French 51 

trader had exchanged his goods for the peltries of 
these red and white skin-hunters, he returned to 
his home, having been absent perhaps a year or 
eighteen months. It was a hard Hfe; many a 
trader perished in the wilderness by cold or star- 
vation, by an upset where the icy current ran down 
the rapids like a mill-race, by the attack of a 
hostile tribe, or even in a dnmken brawl with the 
friendly Indians, when voyageiir, half-breed, and 
Indian alike had been frenzied by draughts of fiery 
liquor.^ 

Next to the commandant, in power, came the 
priest. He bore unquestioned rule over his con- 
gregation, but only within certain limits ; for the 
French of the backwoods, leavened by the pres- 
ence among them of so many wild and bold spirits, 
could not be treated quite in the same way as the 
more peaceful habitants of Lower Canada. The 
duty of the priest was to look after the souls of his 
sovereign's subjects, to baptize, marry, and bury 
them, to confess and absolve them, and keep them 
from backsliding, to say mass, and to receive the 
salary due him for celebrating divine service ; but, 
though his personal influence was, of course, very 

* Journal of Jean Baptiste Perrault, 1783; in Indian Tribes, 
by Henry R. Schoolcraft, Part III., Philadelphia, 1855. See 
also Billon, 484, for an interesting account of the adventures 
of Gratiot, who afterwards, under American rule, built up a 
great fur business, and drove a flourishing trade with Europe, 
as well as the towns of the American seaboard. 



52 The Winnino^ of the West 



great, he had no temporal authority, and could not 
order his people either to fight or to work. Still 
less could he dispose of their land, a privilege in- 
hering only in the commandant and in the commis- 
saries of the villages, where they were expressly 
authorized so to do by the sovereign.^ 

The average inhabitant, though often loose in 
his morals, was very religious. He was supersti- 
tious also, for he firmly believed in omens, charms, 
and witchcraft, and when worked upon by his 
dread of the unseen and the unknown, he some- 
times did terrible deeds, as will be related farther 
on. 

Under ordinary circumstances he was a good- 
humored, kindly man, always polite — his manners 
offering an agreeable contrast to those of some of 
our own frontiersmen, — with a ready smile and 
laugh, and ever eager to join in any merrymaking. 
On Sundays and fast-days he was summoned to 
the little parish church by the tolling of the old 
bell in the small wooden belfry. The church was 
a rude oblong building, the walls made out of 
peeled logs, thrust upright in the ground, chinked 
with moss and coated with clay or cement. 
Thither every man went, clad in a capote or blan- 
ket coat, a bright silk handkerchief knotted round 
his head, and his feet shod with moccasins or 

^ State Department MSS., No. 48, p. 25. A petition con- 
cerning a case in point, affecting the Priest Gibault. 



The Ohio Valley French 53 

strong rawhide sandals. If young, he walked or 
rode a shaggy pony ; if older, he drove his creak- 
ing, springless wooden cart, untired and unironed, 
in which his family sat on stools.' 

The grades of society were much more clearly 
marked than in similar communities of our own 
people. The gentry, although not numerous, pos- 
sessed unquestioned social and political headship 
and were the military leaders ; although, of course, 
they did not have anything like such marked pre- 
eminence of position as in Quebec or New Orleans, 
where the conditions were more like those ob- 
taining in the Old World. There was very little 
education. The common people were rarely versed 
in the mysteries of reading and writing,^ and even 

^ History of Vincennes, by Judge John Law, Vincennes, 
1858, pp. 18 and 140. They are just such carts as I have 
seen myself in the valley of the Red River, and in the big 
bend of the Missouri, carrying all the worldly goods of their 
owners, the French Metis. These Metis — ex-trappers, ex- 
buffalo runners, and small farmers — are the best representa- 
tives of the old French of the West; they are a Uttle less 
civilized, they have somewhat more Indian blood in their 
veins, but they are substantially the same people. It may 
be noted that the herds of buffaloes that during the last 
century thronged the plains of what are now the States of Illi- 
nois and Indiana furnished to the French of Kaskaskia and 
Vincennes their winter meat; exactly as during the present 
century the Saskatchewan Metis Uved on the wild herds imtil 
they were exterminated. 

2 See the lists of signatures in the State Department MSS., 
also Mason's Kaskaskia Parish Records and Law's Vin- 
cennes. As an example : the wife of the Chevalier Vinsenne 



54 The Winning of the West 

the wives of the gentry were often only able to 
make their marks instead of signing their names. 

The little villages in which they dwelt were 
pretty places,' with wide, shaded streets. The 
houses lay far apart, often a couple of hundred 
feet from one another. They were built of heavy 
hewn timbers ; those of the better sort were fur- 
nished with broad verandas, and contained large, 
low-ceilinged rooms, the high mantelpieces and 
the mouldings of the doors and windows being 
made of curiously carved wood. Each village was 
defended by a palisaded fort and blockhouses, 
and was occasionally itself surrounded by a high 
wooden stockade. The inhabitants were extrava- 
gantly fond of music and dancing ^ ; marriages and 
christenings were seasons of merriment, when the 
fiddles were scraped all night long, while the moc- 
casined feet danced deftly in time to the music. 

Three generations of isolated life in the wilder- 
ness had greatly changed the characters of these 
groups of traders, trappers, bateau-men, and ad- 
venturous warriors. It was inevitable that they 
should borrow many traits from their savage 

(who gave his name to Vincennes, and afterwards fell in the 
battle where the Chickasaws routed the northern French and 
their Indian allies) was only able to make her mark. 

Clark in his letters several times mentions the "gentry" 
in terms that imply their standing above the rest of the people. 

' State Department MSS., No. 150, vol. iii., p. 89. 

* Journal of Jean Baptiste Perrault, 1783. 



The Ohio Valley French 55 

friends and neighbors. Hospitable, but bigoted 
to their old customs, ignorant, indolent, and given 
to drunkenness, they spoke a corrupt jargon of the 
French tongue ; the common people were even be- 
ginning to give up reckoning time by months and 
years, and dated events, as the Indians did, with 
reference to the phenomena of nature, such as the 
time of the floods, the maturing of the green corn, 
or the ripening of the strawberries.' All their at- 
tributes seemed alien to the polished army officers 
of old France " ; they had but little more in com- 
mon with the latter than with the American back- 
woodsmen. But they had kept many valuable 
qualities, and, in especial, they were brave and 
hardy, and, after their own fashion, good soldiers. 
They had fought valiantly beside King Louis's 
musketeers, and in alliance with the painted war- 
riors of the forest; later on, they served, though 
perhaps with less heart, under the gloomy ensign 
of Spain, shared the fate of the red-coated grena- 
diers of King George, or followed the lead of the 
tall Kentucky riflemen, 

' Voyage en Amerique (1796), General Victor Collot, Paris, 
1804, p. 318. 

2 Ibid. Collot calls them " un compose de traiteurs, d'aven- 
turiers, de coureurs de bois, rameurs, et de guerriers; igno- 
rans, superstitieux et entetes, qu'aucimes fatigues, aucunes 
privations, aucunes dangers ne peuvent arrSter dans leurs 
enterprises, qu'ils mettent toujours fin; ils n'ont conserv6 
des vertus franjaises que le courage." 



CHAPTER III 

THE APPALACHIAN CONFEDERACIES, 1765-1775 

WHEN we declared ourselves an independ- 
ent nation there were on our borders 
three groups of Indian peoples. The 
northernmost were the Iroquois or Six Nations, 
who dwelt in New York, and stretched down into 
Pennsylvania. They had been for two centuries 
the terror of every other Indian tribe east of the 
Mississippi, as well as of the whites; but their 
strength had already departed. They numbered 
only some ten or twelve thousand, all told, and 
though they played a bloody part in the Revolu- 
tionary struggle, it was merely as subordinate 
allies of the British. It did not lie in their power 
to strike a really decisive blow. Their chastise- 
ment did not result in our gaining new territory; 
nor would a failure to chastise them have affected 
the outcome of the war nor the terms of peace. 
Their fate was bound up with that of the king's 
cause in America and was decided wholly by 
events unconnected with their own success or 
defeat. 

The very reverse was the case with the Indians, 

56 



The Appalachian Confederacies 57 

tenfold more numerous, who lived along our west- 
em frontier. There they were themselves our 
main opponents, the British simply acting as their 
supporters ; and instead of their fate being settled 
by the treaty of peace with Britain, they continued 
an active warfare for twelve years after it had been 
signed. Had they defeated us in the early years 
of the contest, it is more than probable that the 
Alleghanies would have been made our western 
boundary at the peace. We won from them vast 
stretches of territory because we had beaten their 
warriors, and we could not have won it otherwise ; 
whereas the territory of the Iroquois was lost, 
not because of their defeat, but because of the 
defeat of the British. 

There were two great groups of these Indians, 
the ethnic corresponding roughly with the geo- 
graphic division. In the Northwest, between the 
Ohio and the Lakes, were the Algonquin tribes, 
generally banded loosely together; in the South- 
west, between the Tennessee — then called the 
Cherokee — and the Gulf, the so-called Appala- 
chians lived. Between them lay a vast and beau- 
tiful region where no tribe dared dwell, but into 
which all ventured now and then for war and 
hunting. 

The southwestern Indians were called Appala- 
chians by the olden writers, because this was the 
name then given to the southern Alleghanies. It 



58 The Winning of the West 

is doubtful if the term has any exact racial sig- 
nificance; but it serves very well to indicate a 
number of Indian nations whose system of gov- 
ernment, ways of life, customs, and general cul- 
ture were much alike, and whose civilization was 
much higher than was that of most other Ameri- 
can tribes. 

The Appalachians were in the barbarous, rather 
than in the merely savage state. They were di- 
vided into five lax confederacies: the Cherokees, 
Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles. 
The latter were merely a southern offshoot of the 
Creeks or Muscogees. They were far more nu- 
merous than the northwestern Indians, were less 
nomadic, and, in consequence, had more definite 
possession of particular localities; so that their 
lands were more densely peopled. 

In all they amounted to perhaps seventy thou- 
sand souls.' It is more difficult to tell the num- 

^ Letters of Commissioners Hawkins, Pickens, Martin, and 
Mcintosh, to the President of the Continental Congress, 
December 2, 1785. (Given in Senate Documents, 33d Con- 
gress, 2d session. Boundary between Ga. and Fla.) They 
give 14,200 "gim-mcn," and say that "at a moderate calcu- 
lation " there are four times as many old men, women, and 
children as there are gun-men. The estimates of the num- 
bers are very numerous and very conflicting. After care- 
fully consulting all accessible authorities, I have come to the 
conclusion that the above is probably pretty near the truth, 
It is the deliberate, official opinion of four trained experts, 
who had ample opportunities for investigation, and who ex- 



The Appalachian Confederacies 59 

bers of the different tribes ; for the division lines be- 
tween them were very ill-defined, and were subject 
to wide fluctuations. Thus the Creeks, the most 
formidable of all, were made up of many bands, 
differing from each other both in race and speech. 
The language of the Chickasaws and Choctaws 
did not differ more from the tongue of the Chero- 
kees than the two divisions of the latter did from 
each other. The Cherokees of the hills, the Otari, 
spoke a dialect that could not be understood by the 
Cherokees of the lowlands, or Erati. Towns or 
bands continually broke up and split off from their 
former associations, while ambitious and warlike 
chiefs kept forming new settlements, and, if suc- 
cessful, drew large numbers of young warriors from 
the older communities. Thus the boundary lines 
between the confederacies were ever shifting.^ 

amined the matter with care. But it is very possible that 
in allotting the several tribes their numbers they err now and 
then, as the boundaries between the tribes shifted continually, 
and there were always large communities of renegades, such 
as the Chickamaugas, who were drawn from the ranks of 
all. 

^ This is one of the main reasons why the estimates of their 
numbers vary so hopelessly. As a specimen case, among many 
others, compare the estimate of Professor Benjamin Smith 
Barton {Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America, Phila- 
delphia, 1798) with the report of the Commissioner of Indian 
Affairs for 1827. Barton estimated that in 1793 the Appala- 
chian nations numbered in all 13,000 warriors; considering 
these as one fifth of the total population, makes it 65,000. 
In 1837, the Commissioner reports their numbers at 65,304 — 



6o The Winning of the West 

Judging from a careful comparison of the different 
authorities, the following estimate of the numbers 
of the southern tribes at the outbreak of the Revo- 
lution may be considered as probably approxi- 
mately correct. 

The Cherokees, some twelve thousand strong,^ 
were the mountaineers of their race. They dwelt 
among the blue-topped ridges and lofty peaks of 

almost exactly the same. Probably both statements are 
nearly correct, the natural rate of increase having just about 
oflFset the loss in consequence of a partial change of home, 
and of Jackson's slaughtering wars against the Creeks and 
Seminoles. But where they agree in the total, they vary 
hopelessly in the details. By Barton's estimate, the Chero- 
kees numbered but 7500, the Choctaws 30,000; by the 
Commissioner's census the Cherokees numbered 21,911, the 
Choctaws 1 5 ,000. It is of course out of the question to believe 
that while in forty-four years the Cherokees had increased 
threefold, the Choctaws had diminished one half. The terms 
themselves must have altered their significance or else there 
was extensive inter-tribal migration. Similarly, according 
to the reports, the Creeks had increased by 4000 — the Sem- 
inoles and Choctaws had diminished by 3000. 

^American Archives, 4th Series, iii., 790. Drayton's ac- 
count, September 23, 1775. This was a carefully taken cen- 
sus, made by the Indian traders. Apart from the oixtside 
communities such as the Chickamaugas at a later date, there 
were: 

737 gun-men in the 10 overhill towns. 

908 " " 23 middle 

356 " " 9 lower 

a total of 2021 warriors. The outlying towns, who had cast 
off their allegiance for the time being, would increase the 
amount by three or four hundred more. 



The Appalachian Confederacies 6i 

the southern Alleghanies,' in the wild and pictu- 
resque region where the present States of Tennes- 
see, Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas join one 
another. 

To the west of the Cherokees, on the banks of 
the Mississippi, were the Chickasaws, the smallest 
of the southern nations, numbering at the outside 
but four thousand souls ^ ; but they were also the 
bravest and most warlike, and of all these tribal 
confederacies theirs was the only one which was at 
all closely knit together. The whole tribe acted in 
unison. In consequence, though engaged in in- 
cessant warfare with the far more numerous Choc- 
taws, Creeks, and Cherokees, they more than held 
their own against them all; besides having in- 
flicted on the French two of the bloodiest defeats 
they ever suffered from Indians. Most of the 
remnants of the Natchez, the strange sun-wor- 
shippers, had taken refuge with the Chickasaws 

^ History of the American Indians, Particularly Those 
Nations Adjoining to the Mississippi, East and West Florida, 
Georgia, South and North Carolina, and Virginia. By James 
Adair (an Indian trader and resident in the country for 
forty years), London, 1775. A very valuable book, but a 
good deal marred by the author's irrepressible desire to 
twist every Indian utterance, habit, and ceremony into a 
proof that they are descended from the Ten Lost Tribes. He 
gives the number of Cherokee warriors at 2300. 

^ Hawkins, Pickens, Martin, and Mcintosh, in their letter, 
give them 800 warriors ; most other estimates make the num- 
ber smaller. 



62 The Winning of the West 



and become completely identified with them, when 
their own nationality was destroyed by the arms of 
New Orleans. 

The Choctaws, the rudest and, historically, the 
least important of these Indians, lived south of the 
Chickasaws. They were probably rather less nu- 
merous than the Creeks.' Though accounted 
brave, they were treacherous and thievish, and 
were not as well armed as the others. They rarely 
made war or peace as a unit, parties frequently act- 
ing in conjunction with some of the rival European 
powers, or else joining in the plundering inroads 
made by the other Indians upon the white settle- 
ments. Beyond thus furnishing auxiliaries to 
our other Indian foes, they had little to do with 
our history. 

The Muscogees or Creeks were the strongest of 
all. Their southern bands, living in Florida, were 
generally considered as a separate confederacy, 
under the name of Seminoles. They numbered 
between twenty-five and thirty thousand souls, ^ 

' Almost all the early writers make them more numerous, 
Adair gives them 4500 warriors, Hawkins 6000. But much 
less seems to have been known about them than about the 
Creeks, Cherokees, and Chickasaws; and most early esti- 
mates of Indians were largest when made of the least-known 
tribes. Adair's statement is probably the most trustworthy. 
The first accurate census showed the Creeks to be more 
numerous. 

' Hawkins, Pickens, etc., make them "at least" 27,000 in 
1789; the Indian report for 1837 make them 26,844. Dur- 



The Appalachian Confederacies 63 

three fourths of them being the Muscogees proper, 
and the remainder Seminoles. They dwelt south 
of the Cherokees and east of the Choctaws, adjoin- 
ing the Georgians. 

The Creeks and Cherokees were thus by their 
position the barrier tribes of the South, who had 
to stand the brunt of our advance, and who acted 
as a buffer between us and the French and Span- 
iards of the Gulf and the lower Mississippi. Their 
fate once decided, that of the Chickasaws and 
Choctaws inevitably followed. 

The customs and the political and social systems 
of these two tribes were very similar ; and those of 
their two western neighbors were merely ruder 
copies thereof. They were very much further ad- 
vanced than were the Algonquin nations of the 
north. 

Unlike most mountaineers, the Cherokees were 
not held to be very formidable fighters, when com- 
pared with their fellows of the lowlands.^ In 1 760 
and 1 761 they had waged a fierce war with the 
whites, had ravaged the Carolina borders, had 
captured British forts, and successfully withstood 
British armies; but though they had held their 
own in the field, it had been at the cost of ruinous 

ing the half-century they had suffered from devastating wars 
and forced reinovals, and had probably slightly decreased in 
number. In Adair's time their population was increasing. 

' American Archives, sth Series, i., 95. Letter of Charles 
Lee. 



64 The Winning of the West 

losses. Since that period they had been engaged 
in long wars with the Chickasaws and Creeks, and 
had been worsted by both. Moreover, they had 
been much harassed by the northern Indians. So 
they were steadily declining in power and num- 
bers.' 

Though divided linguistically into two races, 
speaking different dialects, the Otari and Erati, 
the political divisions did not follow the lines of 
language. There were three groups of towns, the 
upper, lower, and middle ; and these groups often 
acted independently of one another. The upper 
towns lay for the most part on the Western Waters, 
as they were called by the Americans, — the 
streams running into the Tennessee, Their in- 
habitants were known as Overhill Cherokees and 
were chiefly Otari; but the towns were none of 
them permanent, and sometimes shifted their 
positions, even changing from one group to an- 
other. The lower towns, inhabited by the Erati, 
lay in the flat lands of upper Georgia and South 
Carolina, and were the least important. The 
third group, larger than either of the others, and 
lying among the hills and mountains between 
them, consisted of the middle towns. Its borders 
were ill-marked and were ever shifting. 

Thus the towns of the Cherokees stretched from 
the high upland region, where rise the loftiest 

I Adair, 227. Bartram, 390. 



The Appalachian Confederacies 65 

mountains of eastern America, to the warm, level, 
low country, the land of the cypress and the long- 
leafed pine. Each village stood by itself, in some 
fertile river-bottom, with aroimd it apple orchards 
and fields of maize. Like the other southern In- 
dians, the Cherokees were more industrious than 
their northern neighbors, lived by tillage and 
agriculture as much as by hunting, and kept horses, 
hogs, and poultry. The oblong, story-high houses 
were made of peeled logs, morticed into each other 
and plastered with clay ; while the roof was of chest- 
nut bark or of big shingles. Near to each stood a 
small cabin, partly dug out of the ground, and in 
consequence very warm; to this the inmates re- 
tired in winter, for they were sensitive to cold. 
In the centre of each village stood the great council- 
house or rotunda, capable of containing the whole 
population; it was often thirty feet high, and 
sometimes stood on a raised mound of earth. ^ 

The Cherokees were a bright, intelligent race, 
better fitted to follow the "white man's road" 
than any other Indians. Like their neighbors, 
they were exceedingly fond of games of chance 
and skill, as well as of athletic sports. One of 
the most striking of their national amusements 
was the kind of ball-play from which we derive 
the game of lacrosse. The implements consisted 
of ball-sticks, or rackets, two feet long, strung 

1 Bartram, 365. 

VOL I. — s- 



66 The Winning of the West 



with raw-hide webbing, and of a deerskin ball, 
stuffed with hair, so as to be very solid, and about 
the size of a base ball. Sometimes the game was 
played by fixed numbers, sometimes by all the 
young men of a village; and there were often 
tournaments between different towns and even 
different tribes. The contests excited the most 
intense interest, were waged with desperate resolu- 
tion, and were preceded by solemn dances and re- 
ligious ceremonies ; they were tests of tremendous 
physical endurance, and were often very rough, 
legs and arms being occasionally broken. The 
Choctaws were considered to he the best ball- 
players." 

The Cherokees were likewise fond of dances. 
Sometimes these were comic or lascivious, some- 
times they were religious in their nature, or were 
undertaken prior to starting on the war-trail. 
Often the dances of the young men and maidens 
were very picturesque. The girls, dressed in white, 
with silver bracelets and gorgets, and a profusion 
of gay ribbons, danced in a circle in two ranks; 
the young warriors, clad in their battle finery, 
danced in a ring around them ; all moving in rhyth- 
mic step, as they kept time to the antiphonal 
chanting = and singing, the young men and girls 
responding alternately to each other. 

The great confederacy of the Muscogees or 

' Adair, Bartram. ^ Bartram. 



The Appalachian Confederacies 67 

Creeks, consisting of numerous tribes, speaking at 
least five distinct languages, lay in a well-watered 
land of small timber.' The rapid streams were 
bordered by narrow flats of rich soil, and were mar- 
gined by canebrakes and reed beds. There were 
fine open pastures, varied by sandy pine barrens, 
by groves of palmetto and magnolia, and by great 
swamps and cypress ponds. The game had been 
largely killed out, the elk and buffalo having been 
exterminated, and even the deer much thinned, 
and, in consequence, the hunting parties were 
obliged to travel far into the uninhabited region to 
the northward in order to kill their winter supply 
of meat. But panthers, wolves, and bears still 
lurked in the gloomy fastnesses of the swamps 
and canebrakes, whence they emerged at night to 
prey on the hogs and cattle. The bears had been 
exceedingly abundant at one time ; so much so as 
to become one of the main props of the Creek larder, 
furnishing flesh, fat, and especially oil for cooking 
and other purposes ; and so valued were they that 
the Indians hit upon the novel plan of preserving 
them, exactly as Europeans preserve deer and 
pheasants. Each town put aside a great tract of 
land, which was known as "the beloved bear 
ground," - where the persimmons, haws, chestnuts, 

^ A Sketch of the Creek Country, Benjamin Hawkins. In 
Coll. Ga. Hist. Soc. Written in 1798, but not published till 
fifty years afterwards. ^ Ibid., p. 33. 



68 The Winning of the West 

muscadines, and fox-grapes abounded, and let the 
bears dwell there unmolested, except at certain 
seasons, when they were killed in large numbers. 
However, cattle were found to be more profitable 
than bears, and the "beloved bear grounds" were 
by degrees changed into stock ranges.^ 

The Creeks had developed a very curious semi- 
civilization of their own. They lived in many 
towns, of which the larger, or old towns, bore rule 
over the smaller,^ and alone sent representatives to 
the general councils. Many of these were as large 
as any in the back counties of the colonies 3 ; but 
they were shifted from time to time, as the game 
was totally killed off, and the land exhausted by 
the crops. ^ The soil then became covered by a 
growth of pines, and a so-called "old field" was 
formed. This method of cultivation was, after all, 
much like that of the southern whites, and the 

^ The use of the word "beloved" by the Creeks was quite 
peculiar. It is evidently correctly translated, for Milfort 
likewise gives it as bien aime. It was the title used for any- 
thing held in especial regard, whether for economic or super- 
natural reasons; and sometimes it was used as western tribes 
use the word "medicine" at the present day. The old chiefs 
and conjurers were called the "beloved old men"; what in 
the West we would now call the "medicine squaws " were 
named the "beloved old women." It was often conferred 
upon the chief dignitaries of the whites in writing to them. 

^ Hawkins, 37. 

3 Bartram, 386. The Uchee town contained at least 1500 
people. 

4 Ibid. 



The Appalachian Confederacies 69 

"old fields," or abandoned plantations grown up 
with pines, were common in the colonies. 

Many of the chiefs owned droves of horses and 
horned cattle, sometimes as many as five hundred 
head," besides hogs and poultry ; and some of them 
in addition, had negro slaves. But the tillage of 
the land was accomplished by communal labor; 
and, indeed, the government, as well as the sys- 
tem of life, was in many respects a singular com- 
pound of communism and extreme individualism. 
The fields of rice, com, tobacco, beans, and pota- 
toes were sometimes rudely fenced in with split 
hickory poles, and were sometimes left unfenced, 
with huts or high scaffolds, where watchers kept 
guard. They were planted when the wild fruit was 
so ripe as to draw off the birds, and, while ripen- 
ing, the swine were kept penned up and the horses 
were tethered with tough bark ropes. Pumpkins, 
melons, marsh-mallows, and sunflowers were often 
grown between the rows of com. The planting 
was done on a given day, the whole town being 
summoned ; no man was excepted or was allowed 
to go out hunting. The under-headman super- 
vised the work. 2 

For food they used all these vegetables, as well 
as beef and pork, and venison stewed in bear's oil ; 
they had hominy and corn cakes, and a cool drink 
made from honey and water, 3 besides another 

* Hawkins, 30. ^ Ibid., 39; Adair, 408. 3 Bartram, 184. 



The Winning of the West 



made from fermented com, which tasted much 
hke cider.' They sifted their flour in wickenvork 
sieves, and baked the bread in kettles or on broad 
thin stones. Moreover, they gathered the wild 
fruits, strawberries, grapes, and plums, in their 
season, and out of the hickory-nuts they made a 
thick, oily paste, called hickory milk. 

Each town was built around a square, in which 
the old men lounged all day long, gossiping and 
wrangling. Fronting the square, and surround- 
ing it, were the four long, low communal houses, 
eight feet high, sixteen feet deep, and forty to 
sixty in length. They were wooden frames, sup- 
ported on pine posts, with roof-tree and rafters 
of hickory. Their fronts were open piazzas, their 
sides were lathed and plastered, sometimes with 
white marl, sometimes with reddish clay, and they 
had plank doors and were roofed neatly with cy- 
press bark or clapboards. The eave boards were 
of soft poplar. The barrier towns, near white or 
Indian enemies, had log-houses, with port-holes 
cut in the walls. 

The communal houses were each divided into 
three rooms. The House of the Micos, or Chiefs 
and Headmen, was painted red, and fronted the 
rising sun ; it was highest in rank. The Houses of 
the Warriors and the Beloved ]\Ien — this last being 
painted white — fronted south and north respect- 

^ Milfort, 2 12. 



The Appalachian Confederacies 71 

ively, while the House of the Young People stood 
opposite that of the Micos. Each room was divi- 
ded into two terraces ; the one in front being cov- 
ered with red mats, while that in the rear, a kind of 
raised dais or great couch, was strewn with skins. 
They contained stools hewed out of poplar logs, 
and chests made of clapboards sewed together 
with buffalo thongs.' 

The rotiinda or council-house stood near the 
square on the highest spot in the village. It was 
round, and fifty or sixty feet across, with a high- 
peaked roof ; the rafters were fastened with 
splints and covered with bark. A raised dais ran 
around the wall, strewed with mats and skins. 
Sometimes in the larger council-houses there were 
painted eagles, carved out of poplar wood, placed 
close to the red and white seats where the chiefs 
and warriors sat; or in front of the broad dais 
were great images of the full and the half moon, 
colored white or black; or rudely carved and 
painted figures of the panther, and of men with 
buffalo horns. The tribes held in reverence both 
the panther and the rattlesnake. 

The corn-cribs, fowl-houses, and hot-houses or 
dug-outs for winter use were clustered near the 
other cabins. 

Although in tillage they used only the hoe, they 
had made much progress in some useful arts. They 

* Hawkins, 67. Milfort, 203. Bartram, 386. Adair, 418. 



72 The Winning of the West 

spun the coarse wool of the buffalo into blank- 
ets, which they trimmed with beads. They wove 
the wild hemp in frames and shuttles. They made 
their own saddles. They made beautiful baskets 
of fine cane splints, and very handsome blankets of 
turkey feathers; while out of glazed clay they 
manufactured bowls, pitchers, platters, and other 
pottery. 

In summer they wore buckskin shirts and breech- 
clouts ; in winter they were clad in the fur of the 
bear and wolf, or of the shaggy buffalo. They had 
moccasins of elk- or buffalo-hide, and high thigh- 
boots of thin deerskin, ornamented with fawns' 
trotters, or turkey spurs that tinkled as they 
walked. In their hair they braided eagle-plumes, 
hawk-wings, or the brilliant plumage of the tana- 
ger and redbird. Trousers or breeches of any sort 
they despised as marks of effeminacy. 

Vermilion was their war emblem; white was 
only worn at the time of the Green-Corn Dance. 
In each town stood the war-pole or painted post, a 
small peeled tree-trunk colored red. Some of 
their villages were called white or peace towns; 
others red or bloody towns. The white towns 
were sacred to peace; no blood could be spilled 
within their borders. They were towns of refuge, 
where not even an enemy taken in war could be 
slain; and a murderer who fled thither was safe 
from vengeance. The captives were tortured to 



The Appalachian Confederacies 73 

death in the red towns, and it was in these that the 
chiefs and warriors gathered when they were plan- 
ning or preparing for war. 

They held great marriage feasts ; the dead were 
burned with the goods they had owned in their life- 
time. 

Every night all the people of a town gathered 
in the council-house to dance and sing and talk. 
Besides this, they held there on stated occasions 
the ceremonial dances: such were the dances of 
war and of triumph, when the warriors, painted red 
and black, returned, carrying the scalps of their 
slain foes on branches of evergreen pine, while they 
chanted the sonorous song of victory; and such 
was the Dance of the Serpent, the dance of lawless 
love, where the w^omen and yoimg girls were al- 
lowed to do whatsoever they listed. 

Once a year, when the fruits ripened, they held 
the Green-Corn Dance, a religious festival that 
lasted eight days in the larger towns and four in 
the smaller. Then they fasted and feasted alter- 
nately. They drank out of conch-shells the Black 
Drink, a bitter beverage brewed from the crushed 
leaves of a small shrub. On the third day the high 
priest or fire-maker, the man who sat in the white 
seat, clad in snowy tunic and moccasins, kindled 
the holy fire, fanning it into flames with the un- 
sullied wing of a swan, and burning therein offer- 
ings of the first-fruits of the year. Dance followed 



74 The Winning of the West 

dance. The beloved men and beloved women, the 
priest and priestesses, danced in three rings, sing- 
ing the solemn song of which the words were never 
uttered at any other time ; and at the end the war- 
riors, in their wild war-gear, with white-plume 
head-dresses, took part, and also the women and 
girls, decked in their best, with earrings and arm- 
lets, and terrapin shells filled with pebbles fastened 
to the outside of their legs. They kept time with 
foot and voice, the men in deep tones, with short 
accents, the women in a shrill falsetto ; while the 
clay drums, with heads of taut deer-hide, were 
beaten, the whistles blown, and the gourds and 
calabashes rattled, until the air resounded with the 
deafening noise. 

Though they sometimes burnt their prisoners 
and violated captive women, they generally were 
more merciful than the northern tribes.^ 

But their political and military systems could 
not compare with those of the Algonquins, still less 
with those of the Iroquois. Their confederacy was 
of the loosest kind. There was no central author- 
ity. Every town acted just as it pleased, making 
war or peace with the other towns, or with whites, 
Choctaws, or Cherokees. In each there was a 
nominal head for peace and war, the high chief and 
the head warrior; the former was supposed to be 

' Hawkins and Adair, passim. 
' Ibid. Also vide Bartrara. 



The Appalachian Confederacies 75 

supreme, and was elected for life from some one 
powerful family — as, for instance, the families 
having for their totems the wind or the eagle. 
But these chiefs had little control, and could not 
do much more than influence or advise their sub- 
jects; they were dependent on the will of the ma- 
jority. Each town was a little hotbed of party 
spirit; the inhabitants divided on almost every 
question. If the head chief was for peace, but the 
war chief nevertheless went on the war-path, there 
was no way of restraining him. It was said that 
never, in the memory of the oldest inhabitant, had 
half the nation " taken the war talk" at the same 
time.^ As a consequence, war parties of Creeks were 
generally merely small bands of marauders in search 
of scalps and plunder. In proportion to its num- 
bers, the nation never, until 1813, undertook such 
formidable military enterprises as were undertaken 
by the Wyandots, Shawnees, and Delawares ; and, 
though very formidable individual fighters, even 
in this respect it may be questioned if the Creeks 
equalled the prowess of their northern kinsmen. 

Yet when the Revolutionary War broke out, the 
Creeks were under a chieftain whose consummate 
craft and utterly selfish but cool and masterly di- 
plomacy enabled them for a generation to hold 
their own better than any other native race against 
the restless Americans. This was the half-breed 

^ Hawkins, 29, 70. Adair, 428. 



76 The Winning of the West 

Alexander McGillivray, perhaps the most gifted 
man who was ever born on the soil of Alabama.' 

His father was a Scotch trader, Lachlan Mc- 
Gillivray by name, who came when a boy to 
Charleston, then the headquarters of the comimerce 
carried on by the British with the southern In- 
dians. On visiting the traders' quarter of the 
town, the young Scot was strongly attracted by 
the sight of the weather-beaten packers, with their 
gaudy, half-Indian finery, their hundreds of pack- 
horses, their curious pack-saddles, and their bales 
of merchandise. Taking service with them, he was 
soon helping to drive a pack-train along one of the 
narrow trails that crossed the lonel}^ pine wilder- 
ness. To strong, coarse spirits, that were both 
shrewd and daring, and willing to balance the great 
risks incident to their mode of life against its great 
gains, the business was most alluring. Young Lach- 
lan rose rapidly, and soon became one of the richest 
and most influential traders in the Creek country. 

Like most traders, he married into the tribe, 
wooing and wedding, at the Hickory Ground, be- 
side the Coosa River, a beautiful half-breed girl, 
Sehoy Marchand, whose father had been a French 
officer, and whose mother belonged to the powerful 
Creek family of the Wind. There were born to 
them two daughters and one son, Alexander. 

* History of Alabama, by Albert James Pickett, Charleston, 
1851, ii., 30. A valuable work. 



The Appalachian Confederacies T^ 

All the traders, though facing danger at every mo- 
ment, from the fickle and jealous temper of the 
savages, wielded immense influence over them, and 
none more than the elder McGillivray, a far-sighted, 
unscrupulous Scotchman, who sided alternately 
with the French and English interests, as best 
suited his own policy and fortunes. 

His son was felt by the Creeks to be one of them- 
selves. He was bom about 1746, at Little Tal- 
lasee, on the banks of the clear-flowing Coosa, 
where he lived till he was fourteen years old, play- 
ing, fishing, hunting, and bathing with the other 
Indian boys, and listening to the tales of the old 
chiefs and warriors. He was then taken to Charles- 
ton, where he was well educated, being taught 
Greek and Latin, as well as English history and 
literature. Tall, dark, slender, with commanding 
figure and immovable face, of cool, crafty temper, 
with great ambition and a keen intellect, he felt 
himself called to play no common part. He dis- 
liked trade, and at the first opportunity returned 
to his Indian home. He had neither the moral nor 
the physical gifts requisite for a warrior; but he 
was a consummate diplomat, a bom leader, and 
perhaps the only man who could have used aright 
such a rope of sand as was the Creek confederacy. 

The Creeks claimed him as of their own blood, 
and instinctively felt that he was their only possi- 
ble ruler. He was forthwith chosen to be their 



78 The Winning of the West 

head chief. From that time on he remained 
among them, at one or the other of his plantations, 
his largest and his real home being at Little Tal- 
lasee, where he lived in barbaric comfort, in a 
great roomy log-house with a stone chimney, 
surrounded by the cabins of his sixty negro slaves. 
He was supported by many able warriors, both of 
the half and the full blood. One of them is w^orthy 
of passing mention. This was a young French ad- 
venturer, Milfort, who, in 1776, journeyed through 
the insurgent colonies, and became an adopted son 
of the Creek nation. He first met McGillivray, 
then in his early manhood, at the town of Coweta, 
the great war-town on the Chattahoochee, where 
the half-breed chief, seated on a bearskin in the 
council-house, surrounded by his wise men and 
warriors, was planning to give aid to the British. 
Aftenvards he married one of McGillivray's sisters, 
whom he met at a great dance — a pretty girl, clad 
in a short silk petticoat, her chemise of fine linen 
clasped with silver, her earrings and bracelets of 
the same metal, and with bright-colored ribbons 
in her hair.^ 

The task set to the son of Sehoy was one of in- 
credible difficulty, for he was head of a loose array 

^ Milfort, 23, 326. Milfort's book is very interesting, but as 
the man himself was e\-idently a hopeless liar and braggart, it 
can only be trusted where it was not for his interest to tell a 
falsehood. His book was written after McGillivray's death, 
the object being to claim for himself the glory belonging to 



The Appalachian Confederacies 79 

of towns and tribes from whom no man could get 
perfect, and none but himself even imperfect, 
obedience. The nation could not stop a town from 
going to war, nor, in turn, could a town stop its 
own young men from committing ravages. Thus 
the whites were always being provoked, and the 
frontiersmen were molested as often when they 
were quiet and peaceful as when they were en- 
croaching on Indian land. The Creeks owed the 
land which they possessed to murder and rapine; 
they mercilessly destroyed all weaker communi- 
ties, red or white ; they had no idea of showing jus- 
tice or generosity towards their fellows who lacked 
their strength, and now the measure they had 
meted so often to others was at last to be meted to 
them. If the whites treated them well, it was set 
down to weakness. It was utterly impossible to 
restrain the young men from murdering and plun- 
dering, either the neighboring Indians or the white 

the half-breed chief. He insisted that he was the war chief, 
the arm, and McGillivray merely the head, and boasts of his 
numerous successful war enterprises. But the fact is, that 
during this whole time the Creeks performed no important 
stroke in war; the successful resistance to American en- 
croachments was due to the diplomacy of the son of Sehoy. 
Moreover, Milfort's accounts of his own war deeds are mainly 
sheer romancing. He appears simply to have been one of a 
score of war chiefs, and there were certainly a dozen other 
Creek chiefs, both half-breeds and natives, who were far 
more formidable to the frontier than he was; all their names 
were dreaded by the settlers, but his was hardly known. 



So The Winning of the West 

settlements. Their one ideal of glory was to get 
scalps, and these the young braves were sure to 
seek, no matter how much the older and cooler 
men might try to prevent them. Whether war 
was declared or not made no difference. At one 
time the English exerted themselves successfully 
to bring about a peace between the Creeks and 
Cherokees. At its conclusion a Creek chief taunted 
the mediators as follows: "You have sweated 
yourselves poor in our smoky houses to make 
peace between us and the Cherokees, and thereby 
enable our young people to give you in a short 
time a far worse sweat than you have yet had." ^ 
The result justified his predictions ; the young men, 
having no other foe, at once took to ravaging 
the settlements. It soon became evident that it 
was hopeless to expect the Creeks to behave well 
to the whites merely because they were themselves 
well treated, and from that time on the English fo- 
mented, instead of striving to put a stop to, their 
quarrels with the Choctaws and Chickasaws. 

The record of our dealings with them must in 
many places be impleasant reading to us, for it 
shows grave wrong-doing on our part; yet the 
Creeks themselves lacked only the power, but not 
the will, to treat us worse than we treated them, 
and the darkest pages of their history recite the 
wrongs that we ourselves suffered at their hands. 

' Adair, 279. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE ALGONQUINS OF THE NORTHWEST, 
1769-1774 

BETWEEN the Ohio and the Great Lakes, 
directly north of the Appalachian confed- 
eracies, and separated from them by the 
unpeopled wilderness now forming the States of 
Tennessee and Kentucky, dwelt another set of In- 
dian tribes. They were ruder in life and manners 
than their southern kinsmen, less advanced to- 
wards civilization, but also far more warlike ; they 
depended more on the chase and fishing, and much 
less on agriculture ; they were savages, not merely 
barbarians ; and they were fewer in numbers and 
scattered over a wider expanse of territory. But 
they were farther advanced than the almost purely 
nomadic tribes of horse Indians whom we after- 
wards encountered west of the Mississippi. Some 
of their villages were permanent, at any rate for a 
term of years, and near them they cultivated small 
crops of com and melons. Their usual dwelling 
was the conical wigwam covered with bark, skins, 
or mats of plaited reeds, but in some of the villages 
of the tribes nearest the border, there were regular 

VOL. I. — 6. 

81 



82 The Winning of the West 

blockhouses, copied from their white neighbors. 
They went clad in skins or blankets; the men 
were hunters and warriors, who painted their 
bodies, and shaved from their crowns all the hair 
except the long scalp-lock, while the squaws were 
the drudges who did all the work. 

Their relations with the Iroquois, who lay east of 
them, were rarely very close, and, in fact, were gen- 
erally hostile. They were also usually at odds 
with the southern Indians, but among themselves 
they were frequently united in time of war into a 
sort of lax league, and were collectively designated 
by the Americans as the northwestern Indians. All 
the tribes belonged to the great Algonquin family, 
with two exceptions, the Winnebagos and the 
Wyandots. The former, a branch of the Dako- 
tahs, dwelt west of Lake Michigan ; they came but 
little in contact with us, although many of their 
young men and warriors joined their neighbors in 
all the wars against us. The Wyandots, or Hu- 
rons, lived near Detroit and along the south shore 
of Lake Erie, and were in battle our most redoubt- 
able foes. They were close kin to the Iroquois, 
though bitter enemies to them, and they shared 
the desperate valor of these, their hostile kinsfolk, 
holding themselves above the surrounding Algon- 
quins, with whom, nevertheless, they lived in 
peace and friendship. 

The Algonquins were divided into many tribes, 



The Algonquins 83 

of ever-shifting size. It would be impossible to 
place them all, or indeed to enumerate them, with 
any degree of accuracy; for the tribes were con- 
tinually splitting up, absorbing others, being ab- 
sorbed in turn, or changing their abode, and, in 
addition, there were numerous small sub-tribes or 
bands of renegades, which sometimes were, and 
sometimes were not, considered as portions of 
their larger neighbors. Often, also, separate 
bands, which would vaguely regard themselves 
as all one nation in one generation, would in the 
next have lost even this sense of loose tribal unity. 

The chief tribes, however, were well known, and 
occupied tolerably definite locations. The Dela- 
wares, or Leni-Lenappe, dwelt farthest east, lying 
northwest of the upper Ohio, their lands ad- 
joining those of the Senecas, the largest and 
westernmost of the Six Nations. The Iroquois 
had been their most relentless foes and oppressors 
in time gone by ; but on the eve of the Revolution 
all the border tribes were forgetting their past dif- 
ferences, and were drawing together to make a 
stand against the common foe. Thus it came 
about that parties of young Seneca braves fought 
with the Delawares in all their wars against us. 

Westward of the Delawares lay the Shawnee 
villages, along the Scioto and on the Pickaway 
plains ; but it must be remembered that the Shaw- 
nees, Delawares, and Wyandots were closely united 



84 The Winnino- of the West 



t3 



and their villages were often mixed, in together. 
Still farther to the west, the Miamis or Twigtees 
lived between the Miami and the Wabash, to- 
gether with other associated tribes, the Pianke- 
shaws and the Weas or Ouatinous. Farther still, 
around the French villages, dwelt those scattered 
survivors of the Illinois who had escaped the dire 
fate which befell their fellow-tribesmen because 
they murdered Pontiac. Northward of this scanty 
people lived the Sacs and Foxes, and aroimd the 
upper Great Lakes the numerous and powerful 
Pottawatamies, Ottawas, and Chippewas; fierce 
and treacherous warriors, who did not till the soil, 
and were hunters and fishers only, more savage 
even than the tribes that lay southeast of them.^ 
In the works of the early travellers, we read the 
names of many other Indian nations ; but whether 
these were indeed separate peoples, or branches of 
some of those already mentioned, or whether the 
different travellers spelled the Indian names in 
widely different ways, we cannot say. All that is 
certain is that there were many tribes and sub- 
tribes, who roamed and warred and hunted over 
the fair lands now forming the heart of our mighty 
nation, that to some of these tribes the whites 
gave names and to some they did not, and that the 

' See papers by Stephen D. Peet, on the northwestern 
tribes, read before the State Archaeological Society of Ohio, 
1878. 



The Algonquins 85 

named and the nameless alike were swept down 
to the same inevitable doom. 

Moreover, there were bands of renegades or dis- 
contented Indians, who for some cause had severed 
their tribal connections. Two of the most promi- 
nent of these bands were theCherokees and Mingos, 
both being noted for their predatory and murder- 
ous nature, and their incessant raids on the frontier 
settlers. The Cherokees were fugitives from the 
rest of their nation, who had fled north, beyond the 
Ohio, and dwelt in the land shared by the Dela- 
wares and Shawnees, drawing to themselves many 
of the lawless young warriors, not only of these 
tribes, but of the others still farther off. The 
Mingos were likewise a mongrel banditti, made up 
of outlaws and wild spirits from among the Wyan- 
dots and Miamis, as well as from the Iroquois and 
the Munceys (a sub-tribe of the Delawares). 

All these northwestern nations had at one time 
been conquered by the Iroquois, or at least they 
had been defeated, their lands overrun, and they 
themselves forced to acknowledge a vague over- 
lordship on the part of their foes. But the power 
of the Iroquois was now passing away ; when our 
national history began, with the assembling of the 
first Continental Congress, they had ceased to be a 
menace to the western tribes, and the latter no 
longer feared or obeyed them, regarding them 
merely as allies or neutrals. Yet not only the 



86 The Winning of the West 

Iroquois, but their kindred folk, notably the Wyan- 
dots, still claimed, and received, for the sake of 
their ancient superiority, marks of formal respect 
from the surrounding x^lgonquins. Thus, among 
the latter, the Leni-Lenappe possessed the titular 
headship, and were called "grandfathers" at all 
the solemn councils, as well as in the ceremonious 
communications that passed among the tribes; 
yet in turn they had to use similar titles of respect 
in addressing not only their former oppressors, but 
also their Huron allies, who had suffered under the 
same galling yoke.' 

The northwestern nations had gradually come to 
equal the Iroquois as warriors ; but among them- 
selves the palm was still held by the Wyandots, 
who, although no more formidable than the others 
as regards skill, hardihood, and endurance, never- 
theless stood alone in being willing to suffer heavy 
punishment in order to win a victory. ^ 

The Wyandots had been under the influence of 
the French Jesuits, and were nominally Christians'; 
and though the attempt to civilize them had not 
been very successful, and they remained in most 

' Barton, xxv. 

^ Gen. W. H. Harrison, Aborigines of the Ohio Valley. Old 
"Tippecanoe" was the best possible authority for their 
courage. 

3 Remarkable Occurrences in the Life and Travels of Colonel 
James Smith, etc., written by himself, Lexington, Ky., 1799. 
Smith is our best contemporary authority on Indian warfare; 



The Algonquins 87 

respects precisely like the Indians around them, 
there had been at least one point gained, for they 
were not, as a rule, nearly so cruel to their prison- 
ers. Thus they surpassed their neighbors in mer- 
cifulness as well as valor. All the Algonquin tribes 
stood, in this respect, much on the same plane. 
The Delawares, whose fate it had been to be ever 
buffeted about by both the whites and the reds, had 
long cowered under the Iroquois terror, but they 
had at last shaken it off, had reasserted the supe- 
riority which tradition says they once before held, 
and had become a formidable and warlike race. 
Indeed, it is curious to study how the Delawares 
have changed in respect to their martial prowess 
since the days when the whites first came in con- 
tact w4th them. They were then not accounted a 
formidable people, and were not feared by any of 
their neighbors. By the time the Revolution 
broke out, they had become better warriors, and 
during the twenty years' Indian warfare that en- 
sued were as formidable as most of the other red- 
skins. But when moved west of the Mississippi, 
instead of their spirit being broken, they became 
more warlike than ever, and throughout the present 
century they have been the most renowned fighters 



he lived with them for several years, and fought them in 
many campaigns. Besides several editions of the above, he 
also published, in 1812, at Paris, Ky., a "Treatise" on Indian 
warfare, which holds much the same matter. 



88 The Winning of the West 

of all the Indian peoples, and, moreover, they have 
been celebrated for their roving, adventurous 
nature. Their numbers have steadily dwindled, 
owing to their incessant wars and to the danger- 
ous nature of their long roamings.^ 

It is impossible to make any but the roughest 
guess at the numbers of these northwestern In- 
dians. It seems probable that there were con- 
siderably over fifty thousand of them in all ; but 
no definite assertion can be made even as to the 
dift'erent tribes. As with the southern Indians, 
old-time writers certainly greatly exaggerated 
their numbers, and their modem followers show a 
tendency to fall into the opposite fault, the truth 
being that any number of isolated observations 
to support either position can be culled from the 
works of the contemporary travellers and statis- 
ticians.^ No two independent observ^ers give the 
same figures. One main reason for this is doubt- 

* See Parkman's Oregon Trail. In 1S84 I myself met two 
Delawares hunting alone, just north of the Black Hills. 
They were returning from a trip to the Rocky Mountains. 
I could not but admire their strong, manly forms, and the 
disdainful resolution with which they had hunted and trav- 
elled for so many hundred miles, in defiance of the white 
frontiersmen and of the -wild native tribes as well. I think 
they were in more danger from the latter than the former; 
but they seemed perfectly confident of their ability to hold 
their own against both. 

' Sec Barton, the Madison MSS., Schoolcraft, Thos. Hutch- 
ins (who accompanied Bouquet), Smythe, Pike, various re- 
ports of the U. S. Indian Commissioners, etc. 



The Algonquins 89 

less the exceedingly loose way in which the word 
' ' tribe ' ' was used. If a man speaks of the Miamis 
and the Delawares, for instance, before we can 
understand him we must know whether he includes 
therein the Weas and the Munceys, for he may 
or may not. By quoting the numbers attributed 
by the old writers to the various sub-tribes, and 
then comparing them with the numbers given later 
on by writers using the same names, but speaking 
of entire confederacies, it is easy to work out an 
apparent increase, while a reversal of the process 
shows an appalling decrease. Moreover, as the 
bands broke up, wandered apart, and then rejoined 
each other or not, as events fell out, two successive 
observers might make widely different estimates. 
Many tribes that have disappeared were undoubt- 
edly actually destroyed ; many more have simply 
changed their names, or have been absorbed by 
other tribes. Similarly, those that have apparently 
held their own have done so at the expense of 
their neighbors. This was made all the easier by 
the fact that the Algonquins were so closely re- 
lated in customs and language ; indeed, there was 
constant intermarriage between the different 
tribes. On the whole, however, there is no ques- 
tion that, in striking contrast to the southern or 
Appalachian Indians, these northwestern tribes 
have suffered a terrible diminution in numbers. 
With many of them we did not come into direct 



90 The Winning of the West 

contact for long years after our birth as a nation. 
Perhaps those tribes with all or part of whose war- 
riors we were brought into collision at some time 
diH-ing or immediately succeeding the Revolu- 
tionary War may have amounted to thirty thou- 
sand souls.' But though they acknowledged 
kinship with one another, and though they all alike 
hated the Americans; and though, moreover, all 
at times met in the great councils, to smoke the 
calumet of peace, and brighten the chain of friend- 
ship ^ among themselves, and to take up the toma- 
hawk 3 against the white foes, yet the tie that 
bound them together was so loose, and they were 
so fickle and so split up by jarring interests and 
small jealousies, that never more than half of them 
went to war at the same time. Very frequently 
even the members of a tribe would fail to act to- 
gether. 

Thus it came about that during the forty 
years intervening between Braddock's defeat and 
Wayne's victory, though these northwestern tribes 
waged incessant, unending, relentless warfare 

' I base this number on a careful examination of the tribes 
named above, discarding such of the northern bands of the 
Chippewas, for instance, as were tmHkely at that time to 
have been drawn into war with us. 

* The expressions generally used by them in sending their 
war talks and peace talks to one another or the whites. 
Hundreds of copies of these "talks" are preserved at Wash- 
ington. 3 Ibid. 



The Algonquins 91 

against our borders, yet they never at any one 
time had more than three thousand warriors in 
the field, and frequently not half that number ' ; 
and in all the battles they fought with British and 
American troops, there was not one in which they 
were eleven hundred strong.^ 

But they were superb individual fighters, beauti- 
fully drilled in their own discipline ^ ; and they 
were favored beyond measure by the nature of 
their ground, of which their whole system of 
warfare enabled them to take the utmost possible 
benefit. Much has been written and sung of the 
advantages possessed by the mountaineer when 

' Smith, Reinarkable Occurrences, etc., p. 154. Smith gives 
a very impartial account of the Indian discipline and of their 
effectiveness, and is one of the few men who warred against 
them who did not greatly over-estimate their numbers and 
losses. He was a successful Indian fighter himself. For the 
British regulars he had a true backwoods contempt, although 
having more than the average backwoods sense in acknow- 
ledging their effectiveness in the open. He had lived so long 
among the Indians, and estimated so highly their personal 
prowess, that his opinion must be accepted with caution 
where dealing with matters of discipline and command. 

^ The accounts of the Indian numbers in any battle given by 
British or Americans, soldiers or civilians, are ludicrously ex- 
aggerated as a rule; even now it seems a common belief of 
historians that the whites were generally outnumbered in 
battles, while in reality they were generally much more 
numerous than their foes. 

3 Harrison {loc. cit.) calls them "the finest light troops in 
the world"; and he had had full experience in serving with 
American and against British Infantry. 



92 The Winning of the West 

striving in his own home against invaders from the 
plains ; but these advantages are as nothing when 
weighed with those which make the warhke dweUer 
in forests unconquerable by men who have not his 
training. A hardy soldier, accustomed only to war 
in the open, will become a good cragsman in 
fewer weeks than it will take him years to learn 
to be so much as a fair woodsman ; for it is beyond 
all comparison more difficult to attain proficiency 
in woodcraft than in mountaineering.^ 

The Wyandots, and the Algonquins who sur- 
rounded them, dwelt in a region of sunless, tangled 
forests ; and all the wars we waged for the posses- 
sion of the country between the AUeghanies and 
the Mississippi were carried on in the never-ending 
stretches of gloomy woodland. It was not an 
open forest. The underbrush grew, dense and 
rank, between the boles of the tall trees, making a 
cover so thick that it was in many places impene- 

' Any one who is fond of the chase can test the trtith of this 
proposition for himself, by trying how long it will take him to 
learn to kill a bighorn on the mountains, and how long it 
will take him to learn to kill whitetail deer in a dense 
forest, by fair still-hunting, the game being equally plenty. 
I have known man}^ novices learn to equal the best old 
hunters, red or white, in killing mountain game; I have 
never met one who could begin to do as well as an Indian 
in the dense forest, unless brought up to it — and rarely even 
then. Yet, though woodcraft is harder to learn, it does not 
imply the possession of such valuable qualities as mountain- 
eering; and when cragsman and woodman meet on neutral 
ground, the former is apt to be the better man. 



The Algonqulns 93 

trable, so thick that it nowhere gave a chance 
for human eye to see even as far as a bow could 
carry. No horse could penetrate it save by follow- 
ing the game trails or paths chopped with the axe ; 
and a stranger venturing a hundred yards from a 
beaten road would be so helplessly lost that he 
could not, except by the merest chance, even find 
his way back to the spot he had just left. Here and 
there it was broken by a rare hillside glade or by a 
meadow in a stream valley ; but elsewhere a man 
might travel for weeks as if in a perpetual twi- 
light, never once able to see the sun through the 
interlacing twigs that formed a dark canopy above 
his head. 

This dense forest was to the Indians a home in 
which they had lived from childhood, and where 
they were as much at ease as a farmer on his own 
acres. To their keen eyes, trained for genera- 
tions to more than a wild beast's watchfulness, the 
wilderness was an open book; nothing at rest or 
in motion escaped them. They had begun to 
track game as soon as they could walk ; a scrape 
on a tree-tnmk, a bruised leaf, a faint indentation 
of the soil, which the eye of no white man could 
see, all told them a tale as plainly as if it had been 
shouted in their ears.' With moccasined feet they 

^ To this day the wild — not the half-tame — Indians remain 
unequalled as trackers. Even among the old hunters not one 
white in a hundred can come near them. In my experience 



94 The Winning of the West 

trod among brittle twigs, dried leaves, and dead 
branches as silently as the cougar, and they 
equalled the great wood-cat in stealth and far 
surpassed it in cunning and ferocity. They could 
no more get lost in the trackless wilderness than a 
civilized man could get lost on a highway. More- 
over, no knight of the Middle Ages was so surely 
protected by his armor as they were by their skill 
in hiding ; the whole forest was to the whites one 
vast ambush, and to them a sure and ever-present 
shield. Every tree-trunk was a breastwork ready 
prepared for battle; every bush, every moss- 
covered boulder, was a defence against assault, 
from behind which, themselves unseen, they 
watched with fierce derision the movements of 
their clumsy white enemy. Lurking, skulking, 
travelling with noiseless rapidity, they left a trail 
that only a master in woodcraft could follow, 
while, on the other hand, they could dog a white 
man's footsteps as a hound runs a fox. Their si- 
lence, their cunning and stealth, their terrible 
prowess and merciless cruelty, make it no figure 
of speech to call them the tigers of the human 
race. 

Unlike the southern Indians, the villages of the 

I have known a very few whites who had spent all their lives 
in the wilderness who equalled the Indian average; but I 
never met any white who came up to the very best Indian. 
But, because of their better shooting and their better nerve, 
the whites often make the better hunters. 



The Algonquins 95 

northwestern tribes were usually far from the 
frontier. Tireless, and careless of all hardship, 
they came silently out of unknown forests, robbed 
and murdered, and then disappeared again into 
the fathomless depths of the woods. Half of the 
terror they caused was due to the extreme diffi- 
culty of following them, and the absolute impos- 
sibility of forecasting their attacks. Without 
warning, and unseen until the moment they dealt 
the death-stroke, they emerged from the forest 
fastnesses, the horror they caused being height- 
ened no less by the mystery that shrouded them 
than by the dreadful nature of their ravages. 
Wrapped in the mantle of the unknown, appalling 
by their craft, their ferocity, their fiendish cruelty, 
they seemed to the white settlers devils and not 
men; no one could say with certainty whence 
they came nor of what tribe they were ; and when 
they had finished their dreadful work they retired 
into a wilderness that closed over their trail as the 
waves of the ocean close in the wake of a ship. 

They were trained to the use of arms from their 
youth up, and war and hunting were their two 
chief occupations, the business as well as the 
pleasure of their lives. They were not as skilful 
as the white hunters with the rifle,' — though more 

^ It is curious how to this day the wild Indians retain the 
same traits. I have seen and taken part in many matches 
between frontiersmen and the Sioux, Cheyennes, Grosventres, 



96 The Winning of the West 

so than the average regular soldier, — nor could 
they equal the frontiersman in feats of physical 
prowess, such as boxing and wrestling; but their 
superior endurance and the ease with which they 
stood fatigue and exposure made amends for this. 
A white might outrun them for eight or ten miles ; 
but on a long journey they could tire out any man, 
and any beast except a wolf. Like most barba- 
rians, they were fickle and inconstant, not to be 
relied on for pushing through a long campaign, 
and after a great victory apt to go off to their 
homes, because each man desired to secure his 
own plunder and tell his own tale of glory. They 
are often spoken of as undisciplined ; but in real- 
ity their discipline in the battle itself was very 
high. They attacked, retreated, rallied, or re- 
pelled a charge at the signal of command ; and they 
were able to fight in open order in thick covers 
without losing touch of each other — a feat that no 
European regiment was then able to perform. 

On their own ground they were far more for- 
midable than the best European troops. The 
British Grenadiers throughout the eighteenth cen- 
tury showed themselves superior, in the actual 
shock of battle, to any infantry of continental Eu- 

and Mandans, and the Indians were beaten in almost every 
one. On the other hand, the Indians will stand fatigue, 
hunger, and privation better, but they seem more suscep- 
tible to cold, 



The Algonquins 97 

rope ; if they ever met an over-match, it was when 
pitted against the Scotch Highlanders. Yet both 
grenadier and highlander, the heroes of Minden, 
the heirs to the glory of Marlborough's cam- 
paigns, as well as the sinewy soldiers who shared 
in the charges of Prestonpans and Culloden, 
proved helpless when led against the dark tribes- 
men of the forest. On the march they could not 
be trusted thirty yards from the column without 
getting lost in the woods,' — the mountain train- 
ing of the highlanders apparently standing them 
in no stead whatever, — and were only able to get 
around at all when convoyed by backwoodsmen. 
In fight, they fared even worse. The British regu- 
lars at Braddock's battle, and the highlanders at 
Grant's defeat a few years later, suffered the same 
fate. Both battles were fair fights ; neither was a 
surprise ; yet the stubborn valor of the red-coated 
grenadier and the headlong courage of the kilted 
Scot proved of less than no avail. Not only were 
they utterly routed and destroyed in each case by 
an inferior force of Indians (the French taking 
little part in the conflict), but they were able to 
make no effective resistance whatever; it is to 
this day doubtful whether these superb regulars 
were able, in the battles where they were de- 
stroyed, to so much as kill one Indian for every 

^ See Parkman's Conspiracy of Pontiac; also Montcalm and 
Wolfe. 

7 



98 The Winning of the West 

hundred of their own men who fell. The pro- 
vincials who were with the regulars were the only- 
troops who caused any loss to the foe; and this 
was true in but a less degree of Bouquet's fight at 
Bushy Run. Here Bouquet, by a clever stratagem, 
gained the victory over an enemy inferior in num- 
bers to himself ; but only after a two days' strug- 
gle, in which he suffered a fourfold greater loss 
than he inflicted.' 

When hemmed in so that they had no hope of 
escape, the Indians fought to the death ; but when 
a way of retreat was open they would not stand 
cutting like British, French, or American regulars, 
and so, though with a nearly equal force, would 
retire if they were suffering heavily, even if they 
were causing their foes to suffer still more. This 
was not due to lack of courage ; it was their sys- 
tem, for they were few in numbers, and they did 
not believe in losing their men.^ The Wyandots 

* Bouquet, like so many of his predecessors, and successors, 
greatly exaggerated the nmiibers and loss of the Indians in 
this fight. Smith, who derived his information both from 
the Indians and from the American rangers, states that but 
eighteen Indians were killed at Bushy Run. 

' Most of the plains Indians feel in the same way at pres- 
ent. I was once hunting with a Siovtx half-breed who illus- 
trated the Indian view of the matter in a rather striking way, 
saying: "If there were a dozen of you white hunters and 
you found six or eight bears in the brush, and you knew you 
could go in and kill them all, but that in the fight you would 
certainly lose three or four men yourselves, you would n't go 



The Algonquins 99 

were exceptions to this rule, for with them it was 
a point of honor not to yield, and so they were of 
all the tribes the most dangerous in an actual 
pitched battle.^ 

But making the attack, as they usually did, 
with the expectation of success, all were equally 
dangerous. If their foes were clustered together 
in a huddle they attacked them without hesita- 
tion, no matter what the difference in numbers, 
and shot them down as if they had been elk or 
buffalo, they themselves being almost absolutely 
safe from harm, as they flitted from cover to cover. 
It was this capacity for hiding, or taking advan- 
tage of cover, that gave them their great supe- 
riority; and it is because of this that the wood 
tribes were so much more formidable foes in ac- 
tual battle than the horse Indians of the plains 
afterwards proved themselves. In dense wood- 
land a body of regular soldiers are almost as use- 
less against Indians as they would be if at night 
they had to fight foes who could see in the dark ; it 
needs special and long-continued training to fit 
them in any degree for wood-fighting against such 
foes. Out on the plains the white hunter's skill 

in, would you? You 'd wait iintil you got a better chance, 
and could kill them without so much risk. Well, Indians 
feel the same way about attacking whites that you would 
feel about attacking those bears." 

^ All the authorities, from Smith to Harrison, are unani- 
mous on this point. 



loo The Winning of the West 

with the rifle and his cool resolution give him an 
immense advantage; a few determined men can 
withstand a host of Indians in the open, although 
helpless if they meet them in thick cover; and 
our defeats by the Sioux and other plains tribes 
have generally taken the form of a small force 
being overw'helmed by a large one. 

Not only were the Indians very terrible in bat- 
tle, but they were cruel beyond all belief in vic- 
tory; and the gloomy annals of border warfare 
are stained with their darkest hues because it was 
a war in which helpless women and children suf- 
fered the same hideous fate that so often befell 
their husbands and fathers. It was a war waged 
by savages against armed settlers, whose families 
followed them into the wilderness. Such a war 
is inevitably bloody and cruel; but the inhuman 
love of cruelty for cruelty's sake/ which marks 
the red Indian above all other savages, rendered 
these wars more terrible than any others. For the 
hideous, unnamable, unthinkable tortures prac- 

' Any one who has ever been in an encampment of wild 
Indians, and has had the misfortune to witness the delight 
the children take in torturing little animals, will admit that 
the Indian's love of cruelty for cruelty's sake cannot possibly 
be exaggerated. The young are so trained that when old 
they shall find their keenest pleasure in inflicting pain in its 
most appalling form. Among the most brutal white border- 
ers a man would be instantly lynched if he practised on any 
creature the fiendish torture which in an Indian camp either 
attracts no notice at all, or else excites merely laughter. 



The Algonquins loi 

tised by the red men on their captured foes, and 
on their foes' tender women and helpless children, 
were such as we read of in no other struggle, 
hardly even in the revolting pages that tell the 
deeds of the Holy Inquisition. It was inevitable — 
indeed it was in many instances proper — that 
such deeds should awake in the breasts of the 
whites the grimmest, wildest spirit of revenge and 
hatred. 

The history of the border wars, both in the 
ways they were begun and in the ways they were 
waged, makes a long tale of injuries inflicted, 
suffered, and mercilessly revenged. It could not 
be otherwise when brutal, reckless, lawless bor- 
derers, despising all men not of their own color, 
were thrown in contact with savages who esteemed 
cruelty and treachery as the highest of virtues, 
and rapine and murder as the worthiest of pur- 
suits. Moreover, it was sadly inevitable that the 
law-abiding borderer as well as the white ruffian, 
the peaceful Indian as well as the painted ma- 
rauder, should be plunged into the struggle to 
suffer the punishment that should only have 
fallen on their evil-minded fellows. 

Looking back, it is easy to say that much of the 
wrong-doing could have been prevented; but if 
we examine the facts to find out the truth, not to 
establish a theory, we are bound to admit that the 
struggle was really one that could not possibly 



I02 The Winning of the West 

have been avoided. The sentimental historians 
speak as if the blame had been all ours, and the 
wrong all done to our foes, and as if it would have 
been possible by any exercise of wisdom to recon- 
cile claims that were in their very essence con- 
flicting; but their utterances are as shallow as 
they are untruthful.' Unless we were willing that 
the whole continent west of the Alleghanies should 
remain an unpeopled waste, the hunting-ground 
of savages, war was inevitable ; and even had we 
been willing, and had we refrained from encroach- 
ing on the Indians' lands, the war would have 
come nevertheless, for then the Indians them- 
selves would have encroached on ours. Undoubt- 
edly we have wronged many tribes; but equally 
undoubtedly our first definite knowledge of many 
others has been derived from their unprovoked 
outrages upon our people. The Chippewas, Ot- 
tawas, and Pottawatamies furnished hundreds 
of young warriors to the parties that devastated 
our frontiers generations before we in any way en- 
croached upon or wronged them. 

Mere outrages could be atoned for or settled ; the 
question which lay at the root of our difficulties 
was that of the occupation of the land itself, and 
to this there could be no solution save war. The 
Indians had no ownership of the land in the way 
in which we understand the term. The tribes 

^ See Appendix A. 



The Algonquins 103 

lived far apart ; each had for its hunting-grounds 
all the territory from which it was not barred 
by rivals. Each looked with jealousy upon all 
interlopers, but each was prompt to act as an in- 
terloper when occasion offered. Every good hiuit- 
ing-ground was claimed by many nations. It was 
rare, indeed, that any tribe had an uncontested 
title to a large tract of land; where such title 
existed, it rested not on actual occupancy and 
cultivation, but on the recent butchery of weaker 
rivals. For instance, there were a dozen tribes, 
all of whom hunted in Kentucky, and fought each 
other there, all of whom had equally good titles to 
the soil, and not one of whom acknowledged the 
right of any other; as a matter of fact, they had 
therein no right, save the right of the strongest. 
The land no more belonged to them than it be- 
longed to Boon and the white hunters who first 
visited it. 

On the borders there are perpetual complaints 
of the encroachments of whites upon Indian lands ; 
and naturally the central government at Wash- 
ington, and before it was at Washington, has usu- 
ally been inclined to sympathize with the feeling 
that considers the whites the aggressors, for the 
government does not wish a war, does not itself 
feel any land hunger, hears of not a tenth of the 
Indian outrages, and knows by experience that 
the white borderers are not easy to rule. As a 



I04 The Winning of the West 

consequence, the official reports of the people who 
are not on the ground are apt to paint the Indian 
side in its most favorable light, and are often com- 
pletely untrustworthy, this being particularly the 
case if the author of the report is an eastern man, 
utterly unacquainted with the actual condition of 
affairs on the frontier. 

Such a man, though both honest and intelligent, 
when he hears that the whites have settled on In- 
dian lands, cannot realize that the act has no re- 
semblance whatever to the forcible occupation of 
land already cultivated. The white settler has 
merely moved into an uninhabited waste; he 
does not feel that he is committing a wrong, for 
he knows perfectly well that the land is really 
owned by no one. It is never even visited, except 
perhaps for a week or two every year, and then 
the visitors are likely at any moment to be driven 
off by a rival hunting-party of greater strength. 
The settler ousts no one from the land ; if he did 
not chop down the trees, hew out the logs for a 
building, and clear the ground for tillage, no one 
else would do so. He drives out the game, how- 
ever, and of course the Indians who live thereon 
sink their mutual animosities and turn against the 
intruder. The truth is, the Indians never had any 
real title to the soil ; they had not half as good a 
claim to it, for instance, as the cattlemen now have 
to all eastern Montana, yet no one would assert 



The Algonquins 105 

that the cattlemen have a right to keep immi- 
grants off their vast unfenced ranges. The settler 
and pioneer have at bottom had justice on their 
side; this great continent could not have been 
kept as nothing but a game preserve for squalid 
savages. Moreover, to the most oppressed Indian 
nations the whites often acted as a protection, or, 
at least, they deferred instead of hastening their 
fate. But for the interposition of the whites it is 
probable that the Iroquois would have exter- 
minated every Algonquin tribe before the end of 
the eighteenth century ; exactly as in recent time 
the Crows and Pawnees would have been destroyed 
by the Sioux, had it not been for the wars we have 
waged against the latter. 

Again, the loose governmental system of the 
Indians made it as difficult to secure a permanent 
peace with them as it was to negotiate the pur- 
chase of the lands. The sachem, or hereditary 
peace chief, and the elective war chief, who 
wielded only the influence that he could secure by 
his personal prowess and his tact, were equally 
unable to control all of their tribesmen, and were 
powerless with their confederated nations. If 
peace was made with the Shawnees, the war was 
continued by the Miamis ; if peace was made with 
the latter, nevertheless perhaps one small band 
was dissatisfied, and continued the contest on its 
own account ; and even if all the recognized bands 



io6 The Winning of the West 

were dealt with, the parties of renegades or out- 
laws had to be considered ; and in the last resort 
the full recognition accorded by the Indians to the 
right of private warfare made it possible for any 
individual warrior who possessed any influence to 
go on raiding and murdering unchecked. Every 
tribe, every sub-tribe, every band of a dozen souls 
ruled over by a petty chief, almost every individ- 
ual warrior of the least importance, had to be 
met and pacified. Even if peace were declared, 
the Indians could not exist long without breaking 
it. There was to them no temptation to trespass J 
on the white man's groimd for the purpose of( 
settling ; but every young brave was brought up 
to regard scalps taken and horses stolen, in war 
or peace, as the highest proofs and tokens of skill 
and courage, the sure means of attaining glory and 
honor, the admiration of men and the love of 
women. Where the young men thought thus, and 
the chiefs had so little real control, it was inevi- 
table that there should be many unprovoked fo- 
rays for scalps, slaves, and horses made upon the 
white borderers.' 

As for the whites themselves, they too have 
many and grievous sins against their red neigh- 

' Similarly, the Crows, who have always been treated well 
by us, have murdered and robbed any number of peaceful, 
unprotected travellers during the past three decades, as I 
know personally. 



The Algonquins 107 

bors for which to answer. They cannot be se- 
verely blamed for trespassing upon what was 
called the Indian's land; for, let sentimentahsts 
say what they will, the man who puts the soil to 
use must of right dispossess the man who does 
not, or the world will come to a standstill; but 
for many of their other deeds there can be no par- 
don. On the border each man was a law unto 
himself, and good and bad alike were left in per- 
fect freedom to follow out to the uttermost limits 
their own desires; for the spirit of individualism 
so characteristic of American life reached its ex- 
treme of development in the backwoods. The 
whites who wished peace, the magistrates and 
leaders, had httle more power over their evil and 
unruly fellows than the Indian sachems had over 
the turbulent young braves. Each man did what 
seemed best in his own eyes, almost without let or 
hindrance ; unless, indeed, he trespassed upon the 
rights of his neighbors, who were ready enough to 
band together in their own defence, though slow 
to interfere in the affairs of others. 

Thus the men of lawless, brutal spirit who are 
found in every community, and who flock to 
places where the reign of order is lax, were able to 
follow the bent of their inclinations unchecked. 
They utterly despised the red man; they held it 
no crime whatever to cheat him in trading, to rob 
him of his peltries or horses, to murder him if the 



io8 The Winninor of the West 



J5 



fit seized them. Criminals who generally preyed 
on their own neighbors found it easier, and per- 
haps hardly as dangerous, to pursue their calling 
at the expense of the redskins, for the latter, when 
they discovered that they had been wronged, were 
quite as apt to vent their wrath on some outsider as 
on the original offender. If they injured a white, 
all the whites might make common cause against 
them ; but if they injured a red man, though there 
were sure to be plenty of whites who disapproved 
of it, there were apt to be very few indeed whose 
disapproval took any active shape. 

Each race stood by its own members, and each 
held all of the other race responsible for the mis- 
deeds of a few uncontrollable spirits ; and this clan- 
nishness among those of one color, and the refusal 
or the inability to discriminate between the good 
and the bad of the other color, were the two most 
fruitful causes of border strife.' When, even if he 
sought to prevent them, the innocent man was 
sure to suffer for the misdeeds of the guilty, unless 
both joined together for defence, the former had 
no alternative save to make common cause with 

^ It is precisely the same at the present day. I have 
known a party of Sioux to steal the horses of a bufTalo- 
hunting oiitfit, whereupon the latter retaliated by stealing 
the horses of a party of harmless Grosventres: and I knew 
a party of Cheyennes, whose horses had been taken by white 
thieves, to, in revenge, assail a camp of perfectly orderly cow- 
boys. Most of the ranchmen along the Little Missouri in 1884, 



The Algonquins 109 

the latter. Moreover, in a sparse backwoods set- 
tlement, where the presence of a strong, vigorous 
fighter was a source of safety to the whole com- 
munity, it was impossible to expect that he would 
be punished with severity for offences which, in 
their hearts, his fellow-townsmen could not help 
regarding as in some sort a revenge for the injuries 
they had themselves suffered. Every quiet, peace- 
able settler had either himself been grievously 
wronged, or had been an eye-witness to wrongs 
done to his friends ; and while these were vivid in 
his mind, the corresponding wrongs done the In- 
dians were never brought home to him at all. If 
his son was scalped or his cattle driven off, he 
could not be expected to remember that perhaps 
the Indians who did the deed had themselves been 
cheated by a white trader, or had lost a relative at 
the hands of some border ruffian, or felt aggrieved 
because a hundred miles off some settler had built 
a cabin on lands they considered their own. When 
he joined with other exasperated and injured men 
to make a retaliatory inroad, his vengeance might 
or might not fall on the heads of the real offenders ; 

were pretty good fellows, who would not wrong Indians, yet 
they tolerated for a long time the presence of men who did 
not scruple to boast that they stole horses from the latter; 
while our peaceful neighbors, the Grosventres, likewise per- 
mitted two notorious red-skinned horse-thieves to use their 
reservation as a harbor of refuge, and a starting-point from 
which to make forays against the cattlemen. 



I lo The Winning of the West 

and, in any case, he was often not in the frame of 
mind to put a stop to the outrages sure to be com- 
mitted by the brutal spirits among his ahies — 
though these brutal spirits were probably in a 
small minority. 

The excesses so often committed by the whites, 
when, after many checks and failures, they at last 
grasped victory, are causes for shame and regret ; 
yet it is only fair to keep in mind the terrible pro- 
vocations they had endured. Mercy, pity, mag- 
nanimity to the fallen, could not be expected from 
the frontiersmen gathered together to war against 
an Indian tribe. Almost every man of such a band 
had bitter personal wrongs to avenge. He was 
not taking part in a war against a civilized foe ; he 
was fighting in a contest where women and chil- 
dren suffered the fate of the strong men, and in- 
stead of enthusiasm for his country's flag and a 
general national animosity towards its enemies, 
he was actuated by a furious flame of hot anger, 
and was goaded on by memories of which merely 
to think was madness. His friends had been 
treacherously slain while on messages of peace; 
his house had been burned, his cattle driven off, 
and all he had in the world destroyed before he 
knew that war existed and when he felt quite 
guiltless of all offence ; his sweetheart or wife had 
been carried off, ravished, and was at the moment 
the slave and concubine of some dirty and brutal 



The Algonquins m 

Indian warrior; his son, the stay of his house, 
had been burned at the stake with torments too 
horrible to mention ' ; his sister, when ransomed 
and returned to him, had told of the weary jour- 
ney through the woods, when she carried around 
her neck as a horrible necklace the bloody scalps 
of her husband and children ^ ; seared into his 
eyeballs, into his very brain, he bore ever with 
him, waking or sleeping, the sight of the skinned, 
mutilated, hideous body of the baby who had just 
grown old enough to recognize him and to crow 
and laugh when taken in his arms. Such inci- 
dents as these were not exceptional ; one or more, 
and often all of them, were the invariable atten- 
dants of every one of the countless Indian inroads 
that took place during the long generations of 
forest warfare. It was small wonder that men who 

' The expression "too horrible to mention" is to be taken 
literally, not figuratively. It applies equally to the fate 
that has befallen every white man or woman who has fallen 
into the power of hostile plains Indians during the last ten 
or fifteen years. The nature of the wild Indian has not 
changed. Not one man in a hundred, and not a single wo- 
man, escapes torments which a civilized man cannot look 
another in the face and so much as speak of. Impalement 
on charred sticks, finger-nails split off backwards, finger- 
joints chewed off, eyes burnt out — these tortures can be 
mentioned, but there are others equally normal and custom- 
ary which cannot even be hinted at, especially when women 
are the victims. 

2 For the particular incident, see M'Ferrin's History of 
Methodism in Tennessee, p. 145. 



112 The Winning of the West 

had thus lost everything should sometimes be 
fairly crazed by their wrongs. Again and again on 
the frontier we hear of some such unfortunate 
who has devoted all the remainder of his wretched 
life to the one object of taking vengeance on the 
whole race of the men who had darkened his days 
forever. Too often the squaws and papooses fell 
victims of the vengeance that should have come 
only on the warriors ; for the whites regarded their 
foes as beasts rather than men, and knew that the 
squaws were more cruel than others in torturing 
the prisoner, and that the very children took their 
full part therein, being held up by their fathers to 
tomahawk the dying victims at the stake. ^ 

Thus it is that there are so many dark and 
bloody pages in the book of border warfare, that 
grim and iron-bound volume, wherein we read 
how our forefathers won the wide lands that we 
inherit. It contains many a tale of fierce heroism 
and adventurous ambition, of the daring and reso- 

^ As was done to the father of Simon Girty. Any history 
of any Indian inroad will give examples such as I have men- 
tioned above. See McAfee MSS., John P. Hale's Trans- 
Allcghany Pioneers, De Haas's Indian Wars, Wither's Border 
War, etc. In one respect, however, the Indians east of the 
Mississippi were better than the tribes of the plains from 
whom our borders have suffered during the present century; 
their female captives were not invariably ravished by every 
member of the band capturing them, as has ever been the 
custom among the horse Indians. Still, they were often 
made the concubines of their captors. 



The Algonquins 113 

lute courage of men and the patient endurance of 
women ; it shows us a stern race of freemen who 
toiled hard, endured greatly, and fronted adver- 
sity bravely, who prized strength and courage and 
good faith, whose wives were chaste, who were 
generous and loyal to their friends. But it shows 
us also how they spumed at restraint, and fretted 
under it, how they would brook no wrong to them- 
selves, and yet too often inflicted wrongs on others ; 
their feats of terrible prowess are interspersed with 
deeds of the foulest and most wanton aggression, 
the darkest treachery, the most revolting cruelty ; 
and though we meet with plenty of the rough, 
strong, coarse virtues, we see but little of such 
qualities as mercy for the fallen, the weak, and the 
helpless, or pity for a gallant and vanquished foe. 
Among the Indians of the Northwest, generally 
so much alike that we need pay little heed to 
tribal distinctions, there was one body deserving 
especial and separate mention. Among the tur- 
bulent and jarring elements tossed into wild con- 
fusion by the shock of the contact between 
savages and the rude vanguard of civilization, sur- 
roimded and threatened by the painted warriors 
of the woods no less than by the lawless white 
riflemen who lived on the stump-dotted clearings, 
there dwelt a group of peaceful beings who were 
destined to suffer a dire fate in the most lamen- 
table and pitiable of all the tragedies which were 

VOL. I. 8. 



114 The Winning of the West 

played out in the heart of this great wilderness. 
These were the Moravian Indians.' They were 
mostly Delawares, and had been converted by the 
indefatigable German missionaries, who taught 
the tranquil, Quaker-like creed of Count Zinzen- 
dorf. The zeal and success of the missionaries 
were attested by the marvellous change they had 
wrought in these converts; for they had trans- 
formed them in one generation from a restless, 
idle, bloodthirsty people of hunters and fishers, 
into an orderly, thrifty, industrious folk, believing 
with all their hearts the Christian religion in the 
form in which their teachers both preached and 
practised it. At first the missionaries, surrounded 
by their Indian converts, dwelt in Pennsylvania; 
but, harried and oppressed by their white neigh- 
bors, the submissive and patient Moravians left 
their homes and their cherished belongings, and 
in 1 771 moved out into the wilderness northwest 
of the Ohio. It is a bitter and unanswerable 
commentary on the workings of a non-resistant 
creed, when reduced to practice, that such out- 
rages and massacres as those committed on these 
helpless Indians were more numerous and fla- 
grant in the colony the Quakers governed than in 

' The missionaries called themselves United Brethren; to 
outsiders they were known as Moravians. Loskiel, History 
of the Mission of the United Brethren, London, 1794. Hecke- 
welder, Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren, Phila- 
delphia, 1820. 



The Algonquins T15 

any other; their vaunted policy of peace, which 
forbade them to play a true man's part and put 
down wrong-doing, caused the utmost possible 
evil to fall both on the white man and the red. 
An avowed policy of force and fraud, carried out 
in the most cynical manner, could hardly have 
worked more terrible injustice ; their system was 
a direct incentive to crime and wrong-doing be- 
tween the races, for they punished the aggressions 
of neither, and hence allowed any blow to always 
fall heaviest on those least deserving to suffer. 
No other colony made such futile, contemptible 
efforts to deal with the Indian problem ; no other 
colony showed such supine, selfish helplessness in 
allowing her own border citizens to be mercilessly 
harried; none other betrayed such inability to 
master the hostile Indians, while, nevertheless, 
utterly faiHng to protect those who were peace- 
ful and friendly. 

When the Moravians removed beyond the Ohio, 
they settled on the banks of the Muskingum, made 
clearings in the forest, and built themselves Httle 
towns, which they christened by such quaint 
names as Salem and Gnadenhiitten ; names that 
were pathetic symbols of the peace which the 
harmless and sadly submissive wanderers so vainly 
sought. Here, in the forest, they worked and 
toiled, surrounded their clean, neatly kept villages 
with orchards and grain-fields, bred horses and 



1 16 The Winning of the West 

cattle, and tried to do wrong to no man ; all of 
each community meeting every day to worship 
and praise their Creator. But the missionaries 
who had done so much for them had also done one 
thing which more than offset it all ; for they had 
taught them not to defend themselves, and had 
thus exposed the poor beings who trusted their 
teaching to certain destruction. No greater | 
wrong can ever be done than to put a good man 
at the mercy of a bad, while telling him not to 
defend himself or his fellows; in no way can the 
success of evil be made surer and quicker ; but the 
wrong was peculiarly great when, at such a time 
and in such a place, the defenceless Indians were 
thrust between the anvil of their savage red breth- 
ren and the hammer of the lawless and brutal 
white borderer. The awful harvest which the poor 
converts reaped had in reality been sown for them 
by their own friends and would-be benefactors. 

So the Moravians, seeking to deal honestly with 
Indians and whites alike, but in return suspected 
and despised by both, worked patiently year in 
and year out, as they dwelt in their lonely homes, 
meekly awaiting the stroke of the terrible doom 
which hung over them. 



CHAPTER V 

THE BACKWOODSMEN OF THE ALLEGHANIES 
1769-1774 

ALONG the western frontier of the colonies 
that were so soon to be the United States, 
among the foothills of the Alleghanies, on 
the slopes of the wooded mountains, and in the 
long trough-like valleys that lay between the 
ranges, dwelt a peculiar and characteristically 
American people. 

These frontier folk, the people of the up-country, 
or back-country, who lived near and among the 
forest-clad mountains, far away from the long- 
settled districts of flat coast plain and sluggish 
tidal river, were known to themselves and to others 
as backwoodsmen. They all bore a strong like- 
ness to one another in their habits of thought and 
ways of living, and differed markedly from the 
people of the older and more civilized commim- 
ities to the eastward. The western border of our 
country was then formed by the great barrier- 
chains of the Alleghanies, which ran north and 
south from Pennsylvania through Maryland, Vir- 
ginia, and the Carolinas, the trend of the valleys 

117 



II 8 The Winningf of the West 



t> 



being parallel to the seacoast, and the mountains 
rising highest to the southward.' It was difficult 
to cross the ranges from east to west, but it was 
both easy and natural to follow the valleys be- 
tween. From Fort Pitt to the high hill-homes of 
the Cherokees this great tract of wooded and 
mountainous country possessed nearly the same 
features and characteristics, differing utterly in 
physical aspect from the alluvial plains border- 
ing the ocean. 

So, likewise, the backwoods mountaineers who 
dwelt near the great water-shed that separates the 
Atlantic streams from the springs of the Watauga, 
the Kanawha, and the Monongahela, were all 
cast in the same mould, and resembled each other 
much more than any of them did their immediate 
neighbors of the plains. The backwoodsmen of 
Pennsylvania had little in common with the peace- 
ful population of Quakers and Germans who lived 
between the Delaware and the Susquehanna ; and 
their near kinsmen of the Blue Ridge and the 
Great Smoky Mountains were separated by an 
equally wide gulf from the aristocratic planter 
communities that flourished in the tide-water 
regions of Virginia and the Carolinas. Near the 
coast the lines of division between the colonies 

' Georgia was then too weak and small to contribute much 
to the backwoods stock; her frontier was still in the low 
country. 



The Backwoodsmen 119 

corresponded fairly well with the differences be- 
tween the populations ; but after striking the foot- 
hills, though the political boundaries continued to 
go east and west, those both of ethnic and of physi- 
cal significance began to run north and south. 

The backwoodsmen were Americans by birth 
and parentage, and of mixed race ; but the domi- 
nant strain in their blood was that of the Presby- 
terian Irish — the Scotch-Irish, as they were often 
called. Full credit has been awarded the Round- 
head and the Cavalier for their leadership in our 
history; nor have we been altogether blind to 
the deeds of the Hollander and the Huguenot ; but 
it is doubtful if we have wholly realized the im- 
portance of the part played by that stern and 
virile people, the Irish whose preachers taught the 
creed of Knox and Calvin. These Irish represen- 
tatives of the Covenanters were in the West almost 
what the Puritans were in the Northeast, and 
more than the Cavaliers were in the South. Min- 
gled with the descendants of many other races, 
they nevertheless formed the kernel of the dis- 
tinctively and intensely American stock who were 
the pioneers of our people in their march west- 
ward, the vanguard of the army of fighting settlers, 
who, with axe and rifle, won their way from the 
Alleghanies to the Rio Grande and the Pacific.^ 

^ Among the dozen or so most prominent backwoods 
pioneers of the West and Southwest, the men who were the 



I20 The Winning of the West 



The Presbyterian Irish were themselves already 
a mixed people. Though mainly descended from 
Scotch ancestors, — who came originally from both 
lowlands and highlands, from among both the 
Scotch Saxons and the Scotch Celts,' — many of 
them were of English, a few of French Huguenot, ^j 
and quite a number of true old Milesian Irish ^ ex- 
traction. They were the Protestants of the Pro- 
testants ; they detested and despised the Catholics, 
whom their ancestors had conquered, and regarded 

leaders in exploring and settling the lands, and in fighting the 
Indians, British, and Mexicans, the Presbyterian Irish stock] 
furnished Andrew Jackson, Samuel Houston, David Crockett, j 
James Robertson; Lewis, the leader of the backwoods hosts] 
in their first great victory over the northwestern Indians; 
and Campbell, their commander in their first great victory] 
over the British. The other pioneers who stand beside the) 
above were such men as Sevier, a Shenandoah Huguenot;] 
Shelby, of Welsh blood; and Boon and Clark, both of Eng- 
lish stock, the former from Pennsylvania, the latter from] 
Virginia. 

' Of course, generations before they ever came to America,] 
the McAfees, McClungs, Campbells, McCoshes, etc., had be- 
come indistinguishable from the Todds, Armstrongs, Elliotts, j 
and the like. 

^ A notable instance being that of the Lewis family, of j 
Great Kanawha fame. 

3 The Blount MSS. contain many muster-rolls and pay-rolls! 
of the frontier forces of North Carolina during the year 1788.! 
In these, and in the lists of names of settlers preserved in the 
Am. State Papers, Public Lands, ii., etc., we find numerous 1 
names such as Shea, Drennan, O'Neil, O'Brien, Mahoney, 
Sullivan, O'Connell, Maguire, O'Donohue — in fact hardly a 
single Irish name is unrepresented. Of course, many of these 



The Backwoodsmen 121 

the Episcopalians, by whom they themselves had 
been oppressed, with a more sullen, but scarcely 
less intense, hatred/ They were a truculent and 
obstinate people, and gloried in the warlike re- 
nown of their forefathers, the men who had fol- 
lowed Cromwell, and who had shared in the 
defence of Deny and in the victories of the Boyne 
and Aughrim.'' 

They did not begin to come to America in any 
numbers till after the opening of the eighteenth 
century; by 1730 they were fairly swarming 
across the ocean, for the most part in two streams, 
the larger going to the port of Philadelphia, the 
smaller to the port of Charleston. ^ Pushing 
through the long-settled lowlands of the seacoast, 
they at once made their abode at the foot of the 

were the descendants of imported Irish bondservants; but 
many were also free immigrants, belonging to the Presby- 
terian Congregations, and sometimes appearing as pastors 
thereof. For the numerous Irish names of prominent 
pioneers (such as Donelly, Hogan, etc.) see McClung's 
Western Adventures (Louisville, 1879), 52, 167, 207, 308, etc.; 
also DeHaas, 236, 289, etc.; Doddridge, 16, 2S8, 301, etc. 

^ Sketches of North Carolina, William Henry Foote, New 
York, 1846. An excellent book, written after much research. 

^ For a few among many instances: Houston (see Lane's 
Life of Houston) had ancestors at Derry and Aughrim; the 
McAfees (see McAfee MSS.) and Irvine, one of the com- 
manders on Crawford's expedition, were descendants of men 
who fought at the Boyne {Crawford's Campaign, G. W. 
Butterfield, Cincinnati, 1873, p. 26) ; so with Lewis, Campbell, 
etc. 3 Foote, 78 . 



122 The Winning of the West 

mountains, and became the outposts of civiliza- 
tion. From Pennsylvania, whither the great ma- 
jority had come, they drifted south along the 
foothills, and down the long valleys, till they met 
their brethren from Charleston who had pushed 
up into the Carolina back-country. In this land 
of hills, covered by unbroken forest, they took 
root and flourished, stretching in a broad belt from 
north to south, a shield of sinewy men thrust in be- 
tween the people of the seaboard and the red war- 
riors of the wilderness. All through this region 
they were alike ; they had as little kinship with the 
Cavalier as with the Quaker ; the West was won by 
those who have been rightly called the Round- 
heads of the South, the same men who, before any 
others, declared for American independence.^ 

The two facts of most importance to remember 
in dealing with our pioneer history are, first, that 
the western portions of Virginia and the Carolinas 
were peopled by an entirely different stock from 
that which had long existed in the tide-water re- 
gions of those colonies ; and, secondly, that, except 
for those in the Carolinas who came from Charles- 
ton, the immigrants of this stock were mostly from 
the North, from their great breeding-ground and 
nursery in western Pennsylvania.^ 

' Witness the Mecklenburg Declaration. 
' McAfee MSS. Trans- Alleghany Pioneers (John P. Hale), 
17. Foote, 188. See also Columbian Magazine, i., 122, and 



The Backwoodsmen 123 

That these Irish Presbyterians were a bold and 
hardy race is proved by their at once pushing past 
the settled regions, and plunging into the wilder- 
ness as the leaders of the white advance. They 
were the first and last set of immigrants to do this ; 
all others have merely followed in the wake of their 
predecessors. But, indeed, they were fitted to be 
Americans from the very start; they were kins- 
folk of the Covenanters ; they deemed it a reHgious 
duty to interpret their own Bible, and held for a 
divine right the election of their own clergy. For 
generations their whole ecclesiastic and scholastic 
systems had been fundamentally democratic. In 
the hard life of the frontier they lost much of their 
religion, and they had but scant opportunity to 
give their children the schooling in which they be- 
lieved ; but what few meeting-houses and school- 
houses there were on the border were theirs.' The 
numerous families of colonial English who came 
among them adopted their rehgion if they 
adopted any. The creed of the backwoodsman 



Schopf. 406. Boon, Crockett, Houston, Campbell, Lewis, 
were among the southwestern pioneers whose families origi- 
nally came from Pennsylvania. See A nnals of Augusta County, 
Va., by Joseph A. Waddell, Richmond, 1888 (an excellent 
book), pp. 4, 276, 278, for a clear showing of the Presbyterian 
Irish origin of the West Virginians, and of the large German 
admixture. 

' The Irish schoolmaster was everywhere a featixre of early 
western society. 



124 The Winning of the West 

who had a creed at all was Presbyterianism ; for 
the Episcopacy of the tide-water lands obtained 
no foothold in the mountains, and the Method- 
ists and Baptists had but just begun to appear 
in the West when the Revolution broke out.^ 

These Presbyterian Irish were, however, far 
from being the only settlers on the border, al- 
though more than any others they impressed the 
stamp of their peculiar character on the pioneer 
civilization of the West and Southwest. Great 
numbers of immigrants of English descent came 
among them from the settled districts on the East ; 
and though these later arrivals soon became in- 
distinguishable from the people among whom they 
settled, yet they certainly sometimes added a tone 
of their own to backwoods society, giving it here 
and there a slight dash of what we are accustomed 
to consider the distinctively southern or cavalier 
spirit. 2 There was likewise a large German ad- 

^ McAfee MSS. MS. Autobiography of Rev. Wm. Hick- 
man, bom in Virginia in 1747 (in Col. R. T. Durrett's library). 
Trans- Alleghany Pioneers, 147. History of Kentucky Bap- 
tists, J. H. Spencer (Cincinnati, 1885). 

^ Boon, though of English descent, had no Virginia blood 
in his veins; he was an e.xact type of the regular backswood- 
man; but in Clark, and still more in Blount, we see strong 
traces of the "cavalier spirit." Of course, the Cava- 
liers no more formed the bulk of the Virginia people than 
they did of Rupert's armies; but the squires and yeomen 
who went to make up the mass took their tone from their 
leaders. 



The Backwoodsmen 125 

mixture, not only from the Germans of Pennsyl- 
vania, but also from those of the Carolinas.' A 
good many Huguenots likewise camej^" and a few 



' Many of the most noted hunters and Indian fighters were 
of German origin. (See Early Times in Middle Tennessee, 
John Carr, Nashville, 1859, pp. 54 and 56, for Steiner and 
Mansker — or Stoner and Mansco.) Such were the Wetzels, 
famous in border annals, who lived near WheeUng; Michael 
Steiner, the Steiners being the forefathers of many of the 
numerous Kentucky Stoners of to-day; and Kasper Mansker, 
the "Mr. Mansco" of Tennessee writers. Every old western 
narrative contains many allusions to " Dutchmen," as Ameri- 
cans very improperly call the Germans. Their names abound 
on the muster-rolls, pay-rolls, Hsts of settlers, etc., of the day 
(Blount MSS., State Department MSS., McAfee MSS. Am. 
State Papers, etc.) ; but it must be remembered that they 
are often Anglicized, when nothing remains to show the 
origin of the owners. We could not recognize in Custer and 
Herkomer, Kiister and Herckheimer, were not the ances- 
tral history of the two generals already known; and in 
the backwoods, a man often loses sight of his ancestors in a 
couple of generations. In the Carolinas the Germans seem to 
have been almost as plentiful on the frontiers as the Irish 
(see Adair, 245, and Smyth's Tour, i., 236). In Pennsylvania 
they Hved nearer civiUzation (Schoolcraft, 3, 335; Journey 
in the West in 1785, by Lewis Brantz), although also mixed 
with the borderers; the more adventurous among them 
naturally seeking the frontier. 

* Giving to the backwoods society such famiHes as the 
Seviers and Lenoirs. The Huguenots, like the Germans, 
frequently had their names Anglicized. The best known 
and most often quoted example is that of the Blancpied 
family, part of whom have become Whitefoots, while the 
others, living on the coast, have suffered a marvellous sea- 
change, the nanie reappearing as "Blumpy." 



126 The Winning of the West 

Hollanders ' and even Swedes, => from the banks of 
the Delaware, or perhaps from farther off still. 

A single generation, passed under the hard con- 
ditions of life in the wilderness, was enough to 
weld together into one people the representatives 
of these numerous and widely different races ; and 
the children of the next generation became indis- 
tinguishable from one another. Long before the 
first Continental Congress assembled, the back- 
woodsmen, whatever their blood, had become 
Americans, one in speech, thought, and character, 
clutching firmly the land in which their fathers and 
grandfathers had lived before them. They had 
lost all remembrance of Europe and all sympathy 
with things European; they had become as em- 
phatically products native to the soil as were 
the tough and supple hickories out of which 
they fashioned the handles of their long, light 

' To the western American, who was not given to nice 
ethnic distinctions, both German and Hollander were simply 
Dutchmen; but occasionally we find names like Van Meter, 
Van Buskirk, Van Swearingen, which carry their origin on 
their faces (De Haas, 317, 319; Doddridge, 307). 

' The Scandinavian names, in an unlettered community, 
soon become indistinguishable from those of the surround- 
ing Americans — Jansen. Petersen, etc., being readily Amer- 
icanized. It is, therefore, rarely that they show their 
parentage. Still, we now and then come across one that is 
unmistakable, as Erickson.for instance (see p. 51 of Colonel 
Reuben T. Durrett's admirable Life and Writings of John 
Filson, Louisville and Cincinnati, 1884). 



The Backwoodsmen 127 

axes. Their grim, harsh, narrow Hves were yet 
strangely fascinating and full of adventurous 
toil and danger; none but natures as strong, as 
freedom-loving, and as full of bold defiance as 
theirs could have endured existence on the terms 
which these men found pleasurable. Their iron 
surroundings made a mould which turned out all 
alike in the same shape. They resembled one 
another, and they differed from the rest of the 
world — even the world of America, and infinitely 
more, the world of Europe — in dress, in customs, 
and in mode of life. 

Where their lands abutted on the more settled 
districts to the eastward, the population was of 
course thickest, and their peculiarities least. Here 
and there at such points they built small back- 
woods burgs or towns, rude, straggling, unkempt 
villages, with a store or two, a tavern, — sometimes 
good, often a "scandalous hog-sty," where trav- 
ellers were devoured by fleas, and every one slept 
and ate in one room,' — a small log school-house, 
and a little church, presided over by a hard-fea- 
tured Presbyterian preacher, gloomy, earnest, and 
zealous, probably bigoted and narrow-minded, but 
nevertheless a great power for good in the com- 
munity.'' 

' MS. Journal of Matthew Clarkson, 1766. See also Voy- 
age dans les Etats-Unis, 'La. Rochefoucauld- Liancourt, Paris, 
L'An VII., i., 104. 

2 The borderers had the true Calvinistic taste in preaching. 



128 The Winning of the West 

However, the backwoodsmen as a class neither 
built towns nor loved to dwell therein. They were 
to be seen at their best in the vast, interminable 
forests that formed their chosen home. They won 
and kept their lands by force, and ever lived either 
at war or in dread of war. Hence they settled 
always in groups of several families each, all 
banded together for mutual protection. Their 
red foes were strong and terrible, cunning in 
council, dreadful in battle, merciless beyond be- 
lief in victory. The men of the border did not 
overcome and dispossess cowards and weaklings; 
they marched forth to spoil the stout-hearted and 
to take for a prey the possessions of the men of 
might. Every acre, every rood of ground which 
they claimed had to be cleared by the axe and 
held with the rifle. Not only was the chopping 
down of the forests the first preliminary to culti- 
vation, but it was also the surest means of sub- 
duing the Indians, to whom the unending stretches 
of choked woodland were an impenetrable cover 
behind which to move unseen, a shield in making 
assaults, and a strong tower of defence in repelling 
counter-attacks. In the conquest of the West the 
backwoods axe, shapely, well-poised, with long 
haft and light head, was a servant hardly standing 

Clarkson, in his journal of his western trip, mentions with 
approval a sermon he heard as being "a very judicious and 
alarming discourse." 



The Backwoodsmen 129 

second even to the rifle ; the two were the national 
weapons of the American backwoodsman, and in 
their use he has never been excelled. 

When a group of families moved out into the 
wilderness they built themselves a station or 
stockade fort: a square palisade of upright logs, 
loop-holed, with strong blockhouses as bastions 
at the corners. One side at least was generally 
formed by the backs of the cabins themselves, all 
standing in a row ; and there was a great door or 
gate, that could be strongly barred in case of need. 
Often no iron whatever was employed in any of 
the buildings. The square inside contained the 
provision sheds and frequently a strong central 
blockhouse as well. These forts, of course, could 
not stand against cannon, and they were always in 
danger when attacked with fire ; but save for this 
risk of burning they were very effectual defences 
against men without artillery, and were rarely 
taken, whether by whites or Indians, except by 
surprise. Few other buildings have played so im- 
portant a part in our history as the rough stockade 
fort of the backwoods. 

The families only lived in the fort when there 
was war with the Indians, and even then not in 
the winter. At other times they all separated out 
to their own farms, universally called clearings, 
as they were always made by first cutting off the 
timber. The stumps were left to dot the fields of 



I30 The Winning of the West ' 

grain and Indian corn. The corn in especial was 
the stand-by and invariable resource of the west- 
ern settler ; it was the crop on which he relied to 
feed his family, and when hunting or on a war-trail 
the parched grains were carried in his leather 
wallet to serve often as his only food. But he 
planted orchards and raised melons, potatoes, and 
many other fruits and vegetables as well ; and he 
had usually a horse or two, cows, and perhaps hogs 
and sheep, if the wolves and bears did not inter- 
fere. If he was poor his cabin was made of unhewn 
logs, and held but a single room ; if well-to-do, the 
logs were neatly hewed, and besides the large living- 
and eating-room with its huge stone fireplace, 
there was also a small bedroom and a kitchen, 
while a ladder led to the loft above, in which the 
boys slept. The floor was made of puncheons, great 
slabs of wood hewed carefully out, and the roof 
of clapboards. Pegs of wood were thrust into the 
sides of the house, to serve instead of a wardrobe ; 
and buck antlers, thrust into joists, held the ever- 
ready rifles. The table was a great clapboard set 
on four wooden legs; there were three-legged 
stools, and in the better sort of houses old-fashioned 
rocking-chairs.' The couch or bed was warmly 
covered with blankets, bearskins, and deer-hides. => 

' McAfee MSS. 

^ In the McAfee MSS. there is an amusing mention of the 
skin of a hu.e;e bull elk, killed by the father, which the young- 



The Backwoodsmen 131 

These clearings lay far apart from one another in 
the wilderness. Up to the door-sills of the log- 
huts stretched the solemn and mysterious forest. 
There were no openings to break its continuity; 
nothing but endless leagues on leagues of shad- 
owy, wolf-haunted woodland. The great trees 
towered aloft till their separate heads were lost in 
the mass of foliage above, and the rank under- 
brush choked the spaces between the trunks. On 
the higher peaks and ridge-crests of the mountains 
there were straggling birches and pines, hemlocks 
and balsam firs ' ; elsewhere, oaks, chestnuts, 
hickories, maples, beeches, walnuts, and great 
tulip -trees grew side by side with many other 
kinds. The sunlight could not penetrate the 
roofed archway of murmuring leaves; through 
the gray aisles of the forest men walked always in 
a kind of midday gloaming. Those who had 
lived in the open plains felt when they came to 
the backwoods as if their heads were hooded. 
Save on the border of a lake, from a cliff-top, 
or on a bald knob — that is, a bare hill-shoulder, 

sters christened "old ellick"; they used to quarrel for the 
possession of it on cold nights, as it was very warm, though 
if the hair side was turned in it became slippery and apt to 
slide off the bed. 

' On the mountains the climate, flora, and fauna were all 
those of the north, not of the adjacent southern lowlands. 
The ruffed grouse, red squirrel, snowbird, various Canadian 
warblers, and a peculiar species of boreal field-mouse, the 
evotomys, are all found as far south as the Great Smokies. 



32 The Winning of the West 



— they could not anywhere look out for any 
distance. 

All the land was shrouded in one vast forest. It 
covered the mountains from crest to river-bed, 
filled the plains, and stretched in sombre and 
melancholy wastes towards the Mississippi. All 
that it contained, all that lay hid within it and 
beyond it, none could tell; men only knew that 
their boldest hunters, however deeply they had 
penetrated, had not yet gone through it, that it 
was the home of the game they followed and the 
wild beasts that preyed on their flocks, and that 
deep in its tangled depths lurked their red foes, 
hawk-eyed and wolf -hearted. 

Backwoods society was simple, and the duties 
and rights of each member of the family were plain 
and clear. The man was the armed protector and 
provider, the bread-winner; the woman was the 
housewife and child -bearer. They married young 
and their families were large, for they were strong 
and healthy, and their success in life depended on 
their own stout arms and willing hearts. There 
was everywhere great equality of conditions. 
Land was plenty and all else scarce; so courage, 
thrift, and industry were sure of their reward. 
All had small farms, with the few stock necessary 
to cultivate them; the farms being generally 
placed in the hollows, the division lines between 
them, if they were close together, being the tops 



The Backwoodsmen 133 

of the ridges and the watercourses, especially the 
fonner. The buildings of each farm were usually 
at its lowest point, as if in the centre of an amphi- 
theatre.' Each was on an average of about four 
hundred acres, ^ but sometimes more.^ Tracts 
of low, swampy grounds, possibly some miles 
from the cabin, were cleared for meadows, 
the fodder being stacked, and hauled home in 
winter. 

Each backwoodsman was not only a small 
farmer but also a hunter ; for his wife and children 
depended for their meat upon the venison and 
bear's flesh procured by his rifle. The people 
were restless and always on the move. After be- 

' Doddridge's Settlements and Indian Wars (133), written 
by an eye-witness: it is the most valuable book we have on 
old-time frontier ways and customs. 

2 The land laws differed at different times in different 
colonies; but this was the usual size, at the outbreak of the 
Revolution, of the farms along the western frontier, as under 
the laws of Virginia, then obtaining from the Holston to the 
Alleghany, this amount was allotted every settler who built a 
cabin or raised a crop of corn. 

3 Beside the right to four hundred acres, there was also a 
pre-emption right to one thousand acres more adjoining, to be 
secured by a land-office warrant. As between themselves, the 
settlers had what they called "tomahawk rights," made by 
simply deadening a certain number of trees with a hatchet. 
They were similar to the rights conferred in the West now by 
what is called a " claim shack " or hut, built to hold some good 
piece of land; that is, they conferred no title whatever, except 
that sometimes men would pay for them rather than have 
trouble with the claimant. 



134 The Winning of the West 

ing a little while in a place, some of the men 
would settle down permanently, while others 
would again drift off, farming and hunting alter- 
nately to support their families.' The back- 
woodsman's dress was in great part borrowed from 
his Indian foes. He wore a fur cap or felt hat, 
moccasins, and either loose, thin trousers, or else 
simply leggings of buckskin or elk-hide, and the 
Indian breech-clout. He was always clad in the 
fringed hunting-shirt, of homespun or buckskin, 
the most picturesque and distinctively national 
dress ever worn in America. It was a loose smock 
or tunic, reaching nearly to the knees, and held in 
at the waist by a broad belt, from which hung the 
tomahawk and scalping-knife.^' His weapon was 
the long, small-bore, flint-lock rifle, clumsy, and 
ill-balanced, but exceedingly accurate. It was 
very heavy, and when upright, reached to the 
chin of a tall man; for the barrel of thick, soft 
iron, was four feet in length, while the stock was 
short, and the butt scooped out. Sometimes it 
was plain, sometimes ornamented. It was gen- 
erally bored out — or, as the expression then 
was, "sawed out" — to carry a ball of seventy, 
more rarely of thirty or forty, to the pound ; and 

' McAfee MSS. (particularly Autobiography of Robert 
McAfee.) 

' To this day it is worn in parts of the Rocky Mountains, 
and even occasionally, here and there, in the AUeghanies. 



The Backwoodsmen 135 

was usually of backwoods manufacture.' The 
marksman almost always fired from a rest, and 
rarely at a very long range ; and the shooting was 
marvellously accurate.^ 

In the backwoods there was very little money; 
barter was the common form of exchange, and 
peltries were often used as a circulating medium, 
a beaver, otter, fisher, dressed buckskin or large 
bearskin being reckoned as equal to two foxes 
or wildcats, four coons, or eight minks. A young 
man inherited nothing from his father but his 
strong frame and eager heart ; but before him lay 
a whole continent wherein to pitch his farm, and 
he felt ready to marry as soon as he became of 
age, even though he had nothing but his clothes, 
his horses, his axe, and his rifle.'* If a girl was 
well off, and had been careful and industrious, she 
might herself bring a dowry, of a cow and a calf, 
a brood mare, a bed well stocked with blankets, 

^ The above is the description of one of Boon's rifles, 
now in the possession of Colonel Durrett. According to 
the inscription on the barrel it was made in Louisville, 
Ky., in 1782, by M. Humble. It is perfectly plain; 
whereas one of Floyd's rifles, which I have also seen, is 
much more highly finished, and with some ornamenta- 
tion. 

^ For the opinion of a foreign military observer on the 
phenomenal acuracy of backwoods markmanship, see General 
Victor Collot's Voyage en Amerique, p. 242. 

^ MS. copy of Matthew Clarkson's Journal in 1766 

4 McAfee MSS. {Autobiography of Robert McAfee). 



136 The Winning of the West 

and a chest containing her clothes ' — the latter 
not very elaborate, for a woman's dress consisted 
of a hat or poke bonnet, a "bed gown," perhaps a 
jacket, and a linsey petticoat, while her feet were 
thrust into coarse shoepacks or moccasins. Fine 
clothes were rare ; a suit of such cost more than 
two hundred acres of good land.^ 

The first lesson the backwoodsmen learnt was 
the necessity of self-help; the next, that such a 
community could only thrive if all joined in help- 
ing one another. Log-rollings, house-raisings, 
house-warmings, corn-shuckings, quiltings, and 
the like were occasions when all the neighbors 
came together to do what the family itself could 
hardly accomplish alone. Every such meeting 
was the occasion of a frolic and dance for the 
young people, whisky and rum being plentiful, 
and the host exerting his utmost power to spread 
the table with backwoods delicacies — bear-meat 
and venison, vegetables from the "truck-patch," 
where squashes, melons, beans, and the like were 
grown, wild fruits, bowls of milk, and apple pies, 
which were the acknowledged standard of luxury. ^ 
At the better houses there was metheglin or small 

» Ibid. 

^Memoirs of the Hist. Soc. of Penn., 1826. Account of 
first settlements, etc., by John Watson (1804). 

3 Ibid. An admirable account of what such a frolic was some 
thirty-five years later is to be found in Edward Eggleston's 
Circuit Rider. 



The Backwoodsmen 137 

beer, cider, cheese, and biscuits. Tea was so 
little known that many of the backwoods people 
were not aware it was a beverage and at first at- 
tempted to eat the leaves with salt or butter.^ 

The young men prided themselves on their 
bodily strength, and were always eager to contend 
against one another in athletic games, such as 
wrestling, racing, jumping, and lifting flour-bar- 
rels; and they also sought distinction in vieing 
with one another at their work. Sometimes they 
strove against one another singly, sometimes they 
divided into parties, each bending all its energies 
to be first in shucking a given heap of corn or cut- 
ting (with sickles) an allotted patch of wheat. 
Among the men the bravos or bullies often were 
dandies, also in the backwoods fashions, wearing 
their hair long and delighting in the rude finery of 
hunting-shirts embroidered with porcupine quills ; 
they were loud, boastful, and profane, given to 
coarsely bantering one another. Brutally savage 
fights were frequent; the combatants, who were 
surrounded by rings of interested spectators, strik- 
ing, kicking, biting, and gouging. The fall of one 
of them did not stop the fight, for the man who 
was down was maltreated without mercy until he 
called ' ' enough . ' ' The victor always bragged sav- 
agely of his prowess, often leaping on a stump, 

^ Such incidents are mentioned again and again by Watson, 
Milfort, Doddridge, Carr, and other writers. 



138 The Winning of the West 

crowing and flapping his arms. This last was a 
thoroughly American touch; but otherwise one 
of these contests was less a boxing match than a 
kind of backwoods pankrdtion, no less revolting 
than its ancient prototype of Olympic fame. Yet, 
if the imcouth borderers were as brutal as the 
highly polished Greeks, they were more manly; 
defeat was not necessarily considered disgrace, a 
man often fighting when he was certain to be 
beaten, while the onlookers neither hooted nor 
pelted the conquered. We first hear of the noted 
Indian fighter, Simon Kenton, as leaving a rival 
for dead after one of these ferocious duels, and 
fleeing from his home in terror of the punishment 
that might follow the deed.' Such fights were 
specially frequent when the backwoodsmen went 
into the little frontier towns to see horse-races or 
fairs. 

A wedding was always a time of festival. If 
there was a church anywhere near, the bride rode 

' McClung's Western Adventures. All eastern and Euro- 
pean observers comment with horror on the border brawls, 
especially the eye-gouging. Englishmen, of course, in true 
provincial spirit, complacently contrasted them with their own 
boxing fights; Frenchmen, equally of course, were more 
struck by the resemblances than the differences between the 
two forms of combat. Milfort gives a very amusing account 
of the Anglo-Americains d'une espece particulicre whom 
he calls "crakeurs ou gaugeurs," (crackers or gougers). He 
remarks that he found them tons borgncs (as a result of 
their pleasant fashion of eye-gouging — a backwoods bully in 



The Backwoodsmen 139 

thither on horseback behind her father, and after 
the service her pillion was shifted to the bride- 
groom's steed.' If, as generally happened, there 
was no church, the groom and his friends, all 
armed, rode to the house of the bride's father, 
plenty of whisky being drunk, and the men racing 
recklessly along the narrow bridle-paths, for there 
were few roads or wheeled vehicles in the back- 
woods. At the bride's house the ceremony was 
performed, and then a huge dinner was eaten; 
after which the fiddling and dancing began, and 
were continued all the afternoon, and most of the 
night as well. A party of girls stole off the bride 
and put her to bed in the loft above ; and a party 
of young men then performed the like service for 
the groom. The fun was hearty and coarse, and 
the toasts always included one to the young couple 
with the wish that they might have many big chil- 
dren; for as long as they could remember the 
backwoodsmen had lived at war, while looking 
ahead they saw no chance of its ever stopping, 
and so each son was regarded as a future warrior, 

speaking of another would often threaten to "measure the 
length of his eye-strings,") and that he doubts if there can 
exist in the world des hontmes plus in^chants que ces habitants. 

These fights were among the numerous backwoods habits 
that showed Scotch rather than English ancestry. "I at- 
tempted to keep him down, in order to improve my success, 
after the manner of my own country" {Roderick Random). 

^ Watson. 



HO The Winning of the West 

a help to the whole community.^ The neighbors 
all joined again in chopping and rolling the logs 
for the young couple's future house, then in raising 
the house itself, and finally in feasting and danc- 
ing at the house-warming. 

Funerals were simple, the dead body being 
carried to the grave in a coffin slung on poles and 
borne by four men. 

There was not much schooling, and few boys or 
girls learnt much more than reading, writing, and 
ciphering up to the rule of three. ^ Where the 
school-houses existed they were only dark, mean 
log-huts, and, if in the southern colonies, were 
generally placed in the so-called "old fields," or 
abandoned farms grown up with pines. The 
schoolmaster boarded about with the families; 
his learning was rarely great, nor was his disci- 
pline good, in spite of the frequency and severity 
of the canings. The price for such tuition was at 
the rate of twenty shillings a year, in Pennsylvania 
currency. 3 

Each family did everything that could be done 
for itself. The father and sons worked with axe, 
hoe, and sickle. Almost every house contained a 
loom, and almost every woman was a weaver. 
Linsey-woolsey, made from flax grown near the 
cabin, and of wool from the backs of the few sheep, 
was the warmest and most substantial cloth ; and 

' Doddridge. ^ McAfee MSS. 3 Watson. 



The Backwoodsmen 141 

when the flax crop failed and the flocks were de- 
stroyed by wolves, the children had but scanty 
covering to hide their nakedness. The man 
tanned the buckskin, the woman was tailor and 
shoemaker, and made the deerskin sifters to be 
used instead of bolting-cloths. There were a few 
pewter spoons in use ; but the table furniture con- 
sisted mainly of hand-made trenchers, platters, 
noggins, and bowls. The cradle was of peeled 
hickory bark.' Ploughshares had to be imported, 
but harrows and sleds were made without diffi- 
culty ; and the cooper work was well done. Chaff 
beds were thrown on the floor of the loft, if the 
house-owner was well off. Each cabin had a 
hand-mill and a hominy-block; the last was bor- 
rowed from the Indians, and was only a large 
block of wood, with a hole burned in the top, as a 
mortar, where the pestle was worked. If there 
were any sugar maples accessible, they were 
tapped every year. 

But some articles, especially salt and iron, could 
not be produced in the backwoods. In order to 
get them each family collected during the year all 
the furs possible, these being valuable and yet 
easily carried on pack-horses, the sole means of 
transport. Then, after seeding time, in the fall, 
the people of a neighborhood ordinarily joined in 
sending down a train of peltry-laden pack-horses 

^ McAfee MSS. See, also, Doddridge and Watson. 



142 The Winning of the West 

to some large seacoast or tidal-river trading town, 
where their burdens were bartered for the needed 
iron and salt. The unshod horses all had bells 
hung round their necks ; the clappers were stopped 
during the day, but when the train was halted 
for the night, and the horses were hobbled and 
turned loose, the bells were once more unstopped/ 
Several men accompanied each little caravan, and 
sometimes they drove with them steers and hogs 
to sell on the seacoast. A bushel of alum salt 
was worth a good cow and calf, and as each of 
the poorly fed, undersized pack-animals could 
carry but two bushels, the mountaineers prized 
it greatly, and, instead of salting or pickling their 
venison, they jerked it by drying it in the sun or 
smoking it over a fire. 

The life of the backwoodsmen was one long 
struggle. The forest had to be felled ; droughts, 
deep snows, freshets, cloudbursts, forest fires, and 
all the other dangers of a wilderness life faced. 
Swarms of deer-flies, mosquitoes, and midges 

' Doddridge, 156. He gives an interesting anecdote of one 
man engaged in helping such a pack-train, the bell of whose 
horse was stolen. The thief was recovered, and whipped as 
a punishment, the owner exclaiming as he laid the strokes 
lustily on: "Think what a rascally figure I should make in 
the streets of Baltimore without a bell on my horse." He 
had never been out of the woods before ; he naturally wished 
to look well on his first appearance in civilized life, and it 
never occurred to him that a good horse was left without a 
bell anywhere. 



The Backwoodsmen 143 

rendered life a torment in the weeks of hot 
weather. Rattlesnakes and copperheads were 
very plentiful, and, the former especially, constant 
sources of danger and death. Wolves and bears 
were incessant and inveterate foes of the live 
stock, and the cougar, or panther, occasionally 
attacked man as well.' More terrible still, the 
wolves sometimes went mad, and the men who 
then encountered them were almost certain to 
be bitten and to die of hydrophobia. ^ 

Every true backwoodsman was a hunter. Wild 
turkeys were plentiful. The pigeons at times filled 
the woods with clouds that hid the sun and broke 
down the branches on their roosting-grounds as if 
a whirlwind had passed. The black and gray 
squirrels swarmed, devastating the corn-fields, and 
at times gathering in immense companies and mi- 
grating across mountain and river. The hunter's 
ordinary game was the deer, and after that the 
bear; the elk was already growing uncommon. 

' An instance of this, which happened in my mother's 
family, has been mentioned elsewhere {Hunting Trips of a 
Ranclunan). Even the wolves occasionally attacked man; 
Audubon gives an example. 

^ Doddridge, 194. Dodge, in his Hunting Grounds of the 
Great West, gives some recent instances. Bears were some- 
times dangerous to human life. Doddridge, 64. A slave on 
the plantation of my great-grandfather in Georgia was once 
regularly scalped by a she-bear whom he had tried to rob of 
her cubs, and ever after he was called, both by the other 
negroes and by the children on the plantation, "Bear Bob." 



144 The Winning' of the West 



No form of labor is harder than the chase, and 
none is so fascinating nor so excellent as a training- 
school for war. The successful still-hunter of 
necessity possessed skill in hiding and in creeping 
noiselessly upon the wary quarry, as well as in 
imitating the notes and calls of the different beasts 
and birds; skill in the use of the rifle and in 
throwing the tomahawk he already had; and he 
perforce acquired keenness of eye, thorough ac- 
quaintance with woodcraft, and the power of 
standing the severest strains of fatigue, hardship, 
and exposure. He lived out in the woods for 
many months with no food but meat, and no 
shelter whatever, unless he made a lean-to of 
brush or crawled into a hollow sycamore. 

Such training stood the frontier folk in good 
stead when they were pitted against the Indians ; 
without it they could not even have held their 
own, and the white advance would have been 
absolutely checked. Our frontiers were pushed 
westward by the warlike skill and adventurous 
personal prowess of the individual settlers; reg- 
ular armies by themselves could have done 
little. For one square mile the regular armies 
added to our domain, the settlers added ten, — 
a hundred would probably be nearer the truth. 
A race of peaceful, un warlike farmers would 
have been helpless before such foes as the red 
Indians, and no auxiliary military force could 



The Backwoodsmen 145 

have protected them or enabled them to move 
westward. Colonists fresh from the Old World, 
no matter how thrifty, steady-going, and indus- 
trious, could not hold their own on the frontier; 
they had to settle where they were protected from 
the Indians by a living barrier of bold and self- 
reliant American borderers.' The West would 
never have been settled save for the fierce cour- 
age and the eager desire to brave danger so char- 
acteristic of the stalwart backwoodsmen. 

These armed hunters, woodchoppers, and farm- 
ers were their own soldiers. They built and 
manned their own forts ; they did their own fight- 
ing under their own commanders. There were no 
regiments of regular troops along the frontier. ^ 
In the event of an Indian inroad each borderer 
had to defend himself until there was time for 
them all to gather together to repel or avenge it. 
Everyman was accustomed to the use of arms from 
his childhood ; when a boy was twelve years old 
he was given a rifle and made a fort-soldier, with 
a loophole where he was to stand if the station 
was attacked. The war was never-ending, for 
even the times of so-called peace were broken by 
forays and murders; a man might grow from 
babyhood to middle age on the border, and yet 

^ Schopf, I., 404. 

^ The insignificant garrisons at one or two places need not 
be taken into accoiint, as they were of absolutely no effect. 

VOL. I. — 10. 



146 The Winning of the West 

never remember a year in which some one of his 
neighbors did not fall a victim to the Indians. 

There was everywhere a rude military organiza- 
tion, which included all the able-bodied men of the 
community. Every settlement had its colonels 
and captains; but these officers, both in their 
training and in the authority they exercised, cor- 
responded much more nearly to Indian chiefs than 
to the regular army men whose titles they bore. 
They had no means whatever of enforcing their 
orders, and their ttimultuous and disorderly levies 
of sinewy riflemen were hardly as well disciplined 
as the Indians themselves.' The superior officer 
could advise, entreat, lead, and influence his men, 

^ Brantz Mayer, in Tah-Gah-Jiite, or Logan and Cresap 
(Albany, 1867), ix., speaks of the pioneers as "comparatively 
few in numbers," and of the Indian as "numerous, and fear- 
ing not only the superior weapons of his foe, but the organiza- 
tion and discipline which together made the comparatively 
few equal to the greater ntimber." This sentence embodies 
a variety of popular misconceptions. The pioneers were 
more numerous than the Indians; the Indians were generally, 
at least in the Northwest, as well armed as the whites, and 
in military matters the Indians were actually (see Smith's 
narrative, and almost all competent authorities) superior in 
organization and discipline to their pioneer foes. Most of 
our battles against the Indians of the western woods, whether 
won or lost, were fought by superior numbers on our side. 
Individually, or in small parties, the frontiersmen gradually 
grew to be a match for the Indians, man for man, at least in 
many cases, but this was only true of large bodies of them if 
they were commanded by some one naturally able to control 
their unruly spirits. 



The Backwoodsmen i47 

but he could not command them, or, if he did, the 
men obeyed him only just so far as it suited them. 
If an officer planned a scout or campaign, those 
who thought proper accompanied him, and the 
others stayed at home, and even those who went 
out came back if the fit seized them, or perchance 
followed the lead of an insubordinate junior officer 
whom they liked better than they did his superior.' 
There was no compulsion to perform military 
duties beyond dread of being disgraced in the eyes 
of the neighbors, and there was no pecuniary re- 
ward for performing them ; nevertheless the moral 
sentiment of a backwoods community was too ro- 
bust to tolerate habitual remissness in military 
affairs, and the coward and laggard were treated 
with utter scorn, and were generally in the end 
either laughed out, or "hated out," of the neigh- 
borhood, or else got rid of in a still more summary 
manner. Among people naturally brave and 
reckless, this public opinion acted fairly effectively, 
and there was generally but little shrinking from 
military service.^ 

A backwoods levy was formidable because of the 
high average courage and prowess of the individ- 
uals composing it ; it was on its own ground much 
more effective than a like force of regular soldiers, 
but of course it could not be trusted on a long 

' As examples take Clark's last Indian campaign and the 
battle of Blue Licks. ^ Doddridge, i6i, 185. 



148 The Winning of the West 

campaign. The backwoodsmen used their rifles 
better than the Indians, and also stood punishment 
better, but they never matched them in surprises 
nor in skill in taking advantage of cover, and very 
rarely equalled their discipline in the battle itself. 
After all, the pioneer was primarily a husband- 
man ; the time spent in chopping trees and tilling 
the soil his foe spent in preparing for or practising 
forest warfare, and so the former, thanks to the 
exercise of the very qualities which in the end gave 
him the possession of the soil, could not, as a rule, 
hope to rival his antagonist in the actual conflict 
itself. When large bodies of the red men and 
white borderers were pitted against each other, the 
former were if anything the more likely to have 
the advantage.' But the whites soon copied from 
the Indians their system of individual and private 
warfare, and they probably caused their foes far 
more damage and loss in this way than in the large 

' At the best such a frontier levy was composed of men of 
the type of Leatherstocking, Ishmael Bush, Tom Hutter, 
Harry March, Bill Kirby, and Aaron Thousandacres. When 
animated by a common and overmastering passion, such a 
body would be almost irresistible; but it cotild not hold to- 
gether long, and there was generally a plentiful mixture of 
men less trained in woodcraft, and therefore useless in forest 
fighting; while if, as must generally be the case in any body, 
there were a number of cowards in the ranks, the total lack 
of discipline not only permitted them to flinch from their 
work with impunity, but also allowed them, by their example, 
to infect and demoralize their braver companions. 



The Backwoodsmen 149 

expeditions. Many noted border scouts and In- 
dian fighters — such men as Boon, Kenton, Wetzel, 
Brady, McCulloch, Mansker ' — grew to overmatch 
their Indian foes at their own game, and held them- 
selves above the most renowned warriors. But 
these men carried the spirit of defiant self-reliance 
to such an extreme that their best work was al- 
ways done when they were alone or in small parties 
of but four or five. They made long forays after 
scalps and horses, going a wonderful distance, en- 
during extreme hardship, risking the most terrible 
of deaths, and harrying the hostile tribes into a 
madness of terror and revengeful hatred. 

As it was in military matters, so it was with 
the administration of justice by the frontiersmen ; 
they had few courts, and knew but little law, 
and yet they contrived to preserve order and mor- 
ality with rough effectiveness, by combining to 
frown down on the grosser misdeeds, and to punish 
the more flagrant misdoers. Perhaps the spirit in 
which they acted can best be shown by the recital 
of an incident in the career of the three McAfee 
brothers, 2 who were among the pioneer hunters of 

^ Haywood, DeHaas, Withers, McCliing, and other border 
annalists, give innumerable anecdotes about these and many 
other men, illustrating their feats of fierce prowess, and, too 
often, of brutal ferocity. 

^ McAfee MSS. The story is told both in the Autobiography 
of Robert McAfee, and in the History of the First Settlement on 
Salt River. 



I50 The Winning of the West 

Kentucky. Previous to trying to move their 
families out to the new country, they made a 
cache of clothing, implements, and provisions, 
which in their absence was broken into and plun- 
dered. They caught the thief, "a little diminu- 
tive, red-headed white man," a runaway convict 
servant from one of the tide-water counties of 
Virginia. In the first impulse of anger at finding 
that he was the criminal, one of the McAfees 
rushed at him to kill him with his tomahawk ; but 
the weapon turned, the man was only knocked 
down, and his assailant's gusty anger subsided as 
quickly as it had risen, giving way to a desire to do 
stem but fair justice. So the three captors formed 
themselves into a court, examined into the case, 
heard the man in his own defence, and after due 
consultation decided that "according to their 
opinion of the laws he had forfeited his life, and 
ought to be hung" ; but none of them were willing 
to execute the sentence in cold blood, and they 
ended by taking their prisoner back to his master. 
The incident was characteristic in more than one 
way. The prompt desire of the backwoodsman 
to avenge his own wrong ; his momentary furious 
anger, speedily quelled and replaced by a dogged 
determination to be fair but to exact full retribu- 
tion; the acting entirely without regard to legal 
forms or legal officials, but yet in a spirit which 
spoke well for the doer's determination to uphold 



The Backwoodsmen 151 

the essentials that make honest men law-abiding; 
together with the good faith of the whole proceed- 
ing, and the amusing ignorance that it would have 
been in the least unlawful to execute their own 
rather harsh sentence — all these were typical fron- 
tier traits. Some of the same traits appear in the 
treatment commonly adopted in the backwoods to 
meet the case — of painfully frequent occurrence in 
the times of Indian wars — where a man taken 
prisoner by the savages, and supposed to be mur- 
dered, returned after two or three years' captivity, 
only to find his wife married again. In the wilder- 
ness a husband was almost a necessity to a woman ; 
her surroundings made the loss of the protector 
and provider an appalling calamity; and the 
widow, no matter how sincere her sorrow, soon 
remarried — for there were many suitors where 
women were not over-plenty. If in such a case 
the one thought dead returned, the neighbors and 
the parties interested seem frequently to have held 
a sort of informal court, and to have decided that 
the woman should choose either of the two men she 
wished to be her husband, the other being pledged 
to submit to the decision and leave the settlement. 
Evidently no one had the least idea that there was 
any legal irregularity in such proceedings.^ 

' Incidents of this sort are frequently mentioned. Gen- 
erally, the woman went back to her first husband. Early 
Times inMiddle Temies see, ]oh.n Carr, Nashville, 1859, p. 231. 



152 The Winning- of the West 



The ]\IcAfees themselves and the escaped con- 
vict servant whom they captured typify the two 
prominent classes of the backwoods people. The 
frontier, in spite of the outward uniformity of 
means and manners, is pre-eminently the place of 
sharp contrasts. The two extremes of society — the 
strongest, best, and most adventurous, and the 
weakest, most shiftless, and vicious — are those 
which seem naturally to drift to the border. Most 
of the men who came to the backwoods to hew out 
homes and rear families were stern, manly, and 
honest ; but there was also a large influx of people 
drawn from the worst immigrants that perhaps 
ever were brought to America — the mass of con- 
vict servants, redemptioners, and the like, who 
formed such an excessively undesirable substratum 
to the otherwise excellent population of the tide- 
water regions in Virginia and the Carolinas.^ Many 
of the southern crackers or poor whites spring from 
this class, which also in the backwoods gave birth 
to generations of violent and hardened criminals, 
and to an even greater number of shiftless, lazy, 
cowardly cumberers of the earth's surface. They 
had in many places a permanently bad effect upon 
the tone of the whole community. 

Moreover, the influence of heredity was no more 

' See A Short History of the English Colonies in America, by 
Henry Cabot Lodge (New York, 1886) , for an account of these 
people. 



The Backwoodsmen 153 

plainly perceptible than was the extent of indi- 
vidual variation. If a member of a bad family 
wished to reform, he had every opportunity to do 
so ; if a member of a good family had vicious pro- 
pensities, there was nothing to check them. All 
qualities, good and bad, are intensified and accen- 
tuated in the life of the wilderness. The man who 
in civilization is merely sullen and bad-tempered 
becomes a murderous, treacherous ruffian when 
transplanted to the wilds; while, on the other 
hand, his cheery, quiet neighbor develops into a 
hero, ready uncomplainingly to lay down his life 
for his friend. One who in an eastern city is 
merely a backbiter and slanderer, in the western 
woods lies in wait for his foe with a rifle; sharp 
practice in the East becomes highway robbery in 
the West; but at the same time negative good- 
nature becomes active self-sacrifice, and a general 
belief in virtue is translated into a prompt and 
determined war upon vice. The ne'er-do-well of a 
family who in one place has his debts paid a couple 
of times and is then forced to resign from his clubs 
and lead a cloudy but innocuous existence on a 
small pension, in the other abruptly finishes his 
career by being hung for horse-stealing. 

In the backwoods the lawless led lives of aban- 
doned wickedness; they hated good for good's 
sake, and did their utmost to destroy it. Where 
the bad element was large gangs of horse-thieves. 



154 The Winning of the West 

highwaymen, and other criminals often united 
with the uncontrollable young men of vicious 
tastes, who were given to gambling, fighting, and 
the like. They then formed half-secret organi- 
zations, often of great extent and with wide rami- 
fications ; and if they could control a community 
they established a reign of terror, driving out both 
ministers and magistrates, and killing without 
scruple those who interfered with them. The 
good men in such a case banded themselves to- 
gether as regulators and put down the wicked with 
ruthless severity, by the exercise of lynch law, 
shooting and hanging the worst off-hand.^ 

Jails were scarce in the wilderness, and often 
were entirely wanting in a district, which, indeed, 
was quite likely to lack legal officers also. If 
punishment was inflicted at all it was apt to be 
severe, and took the form of death or whipping. 
An impromptu jury of neighbors decided with a 
rough-and-ready sense of fair play and justice what 
punishment the crime demanded, and then saw to 
the execution of their own decree. Whipping was 

^ The regulators of backwoods society corresponded exactly 
to the vigilantes of the western border to-day. In many of 
the cases of lynch law which have come to my knowledge the 
effect has been healthy for the community; but sometimes 
great injustice is done. Generally, the vigilantes, by a series 
of summary executions, do really good work; but I have 
rarely known them fail, among the men whom they killed 
for good reason, to also kill one or two either by mistake or to 
gratify private malice. 



The Backwoodsmen 155 

the usual reward of theft. Occasionally, torture 
was resorted to, but not often ; and, to their honor 
be it said, the backwoodsmen were horrified at the 
treatment accorded both to black slaves and to 
white convict servants in the lowlands.' 

They were superstitious, of course, believing in 
witchcraft and signs and omens ; and it may be 
noted that their superstition showed a singular 
mixture of old-world survivals and of practices 
borrowed from the savages or evolved by the very 
force of their strange surroundings. At the bot- 
tom they were deeply religious in their tendencies ; 
and although ministers and meeting-houses were 
rare, yet the backwoods cabins often contained 
Bibles, and the mothers used to instil into the 
minds of their children reverence for Sunday,' 
while many even of the hunters refused to hunt on 
that day.3 Those of them who knew the right hon- 
estly tried to live up to it, in spite of the manifold 
temptations to backsliding offered by their lives 
of hard and fierce contention. ^ But Calvinism, 
though more congenial to them than Episcopacy, 
and infinitely more so than Catholicism, was too 
cold for the fiery hearts of the borderers ; they were 

* See Doddridge. ^ McAfee MSS. 3 Doddridge. 

4 Said one old Indian fighter, a Colonel Joseph Brown, of 
Tennessee, with quaint truthfulness: "I have tried also to be 
a religious man, but have not always, in a life of so much ad- 
venture and strife, been able to act consistently." — South- 
western Monthly, Nashville, 1851, i., 80. 



156 The Winning of the West 

not stirred to the depths of their natures till other 
creeds, and, above all, Methodism, worked their 
way into the wilderness. 

Thus the backwoodsmen lived on the clearings 
they had hewed out of the everlasting forest; a 
grim, stern people, strong and simple, powerful for 
good and evil, swayed by gusts of stormy passion, 
the love of freedom rooted in their very hearts' 
core. Their lives were harsh and narrow, they 
gained their bread by their blood and sweat, in the 
unending struggle with the wild ruggedness of 
nature. They suffered terrible injuries at the 
hands of the red men, and on their foes they waged 
a terrible warfare in return. They were relentless, 
revengeful, suspicious, knowing neither ruth nor 
pity; they were also upright, resolute, and fear- 
less, loyal to their friends, and devoted to their 
country. In spite of their many failings, they 
were of all men the best fitted to conquer the 
wilderness and hold it against all comers. 



CHAPTER VI 

BOON AND THE LONG HUNTERS ; AND THEIR HUNT- 
ING IN no-man's land, 1 769-1 7 74 

THE American backwoodsmen had surged up, 
wave upon wave, till their mass trembled 
in the troughs of the Alleghanies, ready 
to flood the continent beyond. The peoples 
threatened by them were dimly conscious of the 
danger which as yet only loomed in the distance. 
Far off, among their quiet adobe villages, in the 
sun-scorched lands by the Rio Grande, the slow 
Indo-Iberian peons and their monkish masters 
still walked in the tranquil steps of their fathers, 
ignorant of the growth of the power that was to 
overwhelm their children and successors; but 
nearer by, Spaniard and Creole Frenchman, Algon- 
quin, and Appalachians were all uneasy as they 
began to feel the first faint pressure of the Ameri- 
can advance. 

As yet they had been shielded by the forest 
which lay over the land like an unrent mantle. 
All through the mountains, and far beyond, it 
stretched without a break ; but towards the mouth 
of the Kentucky and Cumberland rivers the 

157 



158 The Winning of the West 

landscape became varied with open groves of 
woodland, with flower-strewn glades and great bar- 
rens or prairies of long grass. This region, one of 
the fairest in the world, was the debatable ground 
between the northern and the southern Indians. 
Neither dared dwell therein,' but both used it as 
their hunting-grounds ; and it was traversed from 
end to end by the well-marked war traces ^ which 
they followed when they invaded each other's ter- 
ritory. The whites, on trying to break through 
the barrier which hemmed them in from the west- 
ern lands, naturally succeeded best when pressing 
along the line of least resistance ; and so their first 
great advance was made in this debatable land, 
where the uncertainly defined hunting-grounds of 
the Cherokee, Creek, and Chickasaw marched upon 
those of northern Algonquin and Wyandot. 

Unknown and unnamed hunters and Indian 
traders had from time to time pushed some little 
way into the wilderness; and they had been fol- 
lowed by others of whom we do indeed know the 
names, but little more. One explorer had found 
and named the Cumberland river and mountains, 

^ This is true as a whole; but along the Mississippi, in the 
extreme west of the present Kentucky and Tennessee, the 
Chickasaws held possession. There was a Shawnee town 
south of the Ohio, and Cherokee villages in southeastern Ten- 
nessee. 

' The backwoodsmen generally used "trace," where west- 
cm frontiersmen would now say "trail." 



Boon and the Long Hunters 159 

and the great pass called Cumberland Gap.' 
Others had gone far beyond the utmost limits 
this man had reached, and had hunted in the great 
bend of the Cumberland and in the woodland 
region of Kentucky, famed amongst the Indians 
for the abundance of the game.^' But their ac- 
counts excited no more than a passing interest; 

' Dr. Thomas Walker, of Virginia. He named them after 
the Duke of Cumberland. Walker was a genuine explorer 
and surveyor, a man of mark as a pioneer. The journal of his 
trip across the Cumberland to the headwaters of the Ken- 
tucky in 1750 has been preserved, and has just been pub- 
lished by William Cabell Rives (Boston: Little, Brown & Co.). 
It is very interesting, and Mr. Rives has done a real service 
in publishing it. Walker and five companions were absent 
six months. He found traces of earlier wanderers — probably 
hunters. One of his companions was bitten by a bear; three 
of the dogs were wounded by bears, and one killed by an elk; 
the horses were frequently bitten by rattlesnakes; once a 
bull-buffalo threatened the whole party. They killed 13 
buffaloes, 8 elks, 53 bears, 20 deer, 150 tturkeys, and some 
other game. 

^ Hunters and Indian traders visited portions of Kentucky 
and Tennessee years before the country became generally 
known even on the border. (Not to speak of the French, who 
had long known something of the country, where they had 
even made trading posts and built furnaces, as see Haywood, 
etc.) We know the names of a few. Those who went down 
the Ohio, merely landing on the Kentucky shore, do not 
deserve mention; the French had done as much for a century. 
Whites who had been captured by the Indians were some- 
times taken through Tennessee or Kentucky, as John Sailing 
in 1730, and Mrs. Mary IngHs in 1756 (see Trans- Alleghany 
Pioneers, Collins, etc.). In 1654, a certain Colonel Wood was 
in Kentucky. The next real explorer was nearly a century 



i6o The Winning of the West 

they came and went without comment, as lonely 
stragglers had come and gone for nearly a century. 
The backwoods civilization crept slowly westward 
without being influenced in its movements by their 
explorations.' 

Finally, however, among these hunters one arose 
whose wanderings were to bear fruit, who was 

later, though Doherty in 1690, and Adair in 1730, traded with 
the Cherokees in what is now Tennessee. Walker struck the 
headwaters of the Kentucky in 1750; he had been to the Cum- 
berland in 1748. He made other exploring trips. Christo- 
pher Gist went up the Kentucky ini75i. In 1756 and 1758, 
Forts Loudon and Chissel were built on the Tennessee head- 
waters, but were soon after destroyed by the Cherokees. In 
1761, '62, '63, and for a year or two afterwards, a party of 
htmters, under the lead of one Wallen, hunted on the western 
waters, going continually farther west. In 1765, Croghan 
made a sketch of the Ohio River. In 1 766 , James Smith and 
others explored Tennessee. Stoner, Harrod, and Lindsay, 
and a party from South Carolina were near the present site 
of Nashville in 1767 ; in the same year John Finley and others 
were in Kentucky; and it was Finley who first told Boon 
about it and led him thither. 

* The attempt to find out the names of the men who first 
saw the different portions of the western country is not very 
profitable. The first visitors were hunters, simply wandering 
in search of game, not with any settled purpose of explora- 
tion. Who the individual first-comers were, has generally 
been forgotten. At the most it is only possible to find out 
the name of some one of several who went to a given locality. 
The hunters were wandering everjrwhere. By chance, some 
went to places we now consider important. By chance, the 
names of a few of these have been preserved. But the credit 
belongs to the whole backwoods race, not to the individual 
backwoodsman. 



Boon and the Long Hunters i6i 

destined to lead through the wilderness the first 
body of settlers that ever established a com- 
munity in the far West, completely cut off from 
the seaboard colonies. This was Daniel Boon. 
He was bom in Pennsylvania in 1734,' but when 
only a boy had been brought with the rest of his 
family to the banks of the Yadkin in North Caro- 
lina. Here he grew up, and as soon as he came of 
age he married, built a log-hut, and made a clear- 
ing, whereon to farm like the rest of his backwoods 
neighbors. They all tilled their own clearings, 
guiding the plough among the charred stumps left 
when the trees were chopped down and the land 
burned over, and they were all, as a matter of 
course, htmters. With Boon, himting and ex- 
ploration were passions, and the lonely life of the 
wilderness, with its bold, wild freedom, the only 
existence for which he really cared. He was a 
tall, spare, sinewy man, with eyes like an eagle's, 
and muscles that never tired ; the toil and hard- 
ship of his life made no impress on his iron frame, 
unhurt by intemperance of any kind, and he lived 
for eighty-six years, a backwoods hunter to the 
end of his days. His thoughtful, quiet, pleasant 
face, so often portrayed, is familiar to every one; 

^ August 22, 1734 (according to James Parton, in his sketch 
of Boon). His grandfather was an English immigrant; his 
father had married a Quakeress. When he lived on the banks 
of the Delaware, the country was still a wilderness. lie was 
born in Berks Co. 

VOL. I. — II 



1 62 The "Winning of the West 



it was the face of a man who never blustered nor 
bullied, who would neither inflict nor suffer any 
wrong, and who had a limitless fund of fortitude, 
endurance, and indomitable resolution upon which] 
to draw when fortune proved adverse. His self- 
command and patience, his daring, restless love of 
adventure, and, in time of danger, his absolute 
trust in his own powers and resources, all com- 
bined to render him peculiarly fitted to follow thej 
career of which he was so fond. 

Boon himted on the western waters at an early] 
date. In the valley of Boon's Creek, a tributary j 
of the Watauga, there is a beech- tree still standing, ; 
on which can be faintly traced an inscription set- 
ting forth that " D. Boon cilled a bar on [this]! 
tree in the year 1760."' On the expeditions of 
which this is the earliest record he was partly hunt- 
ing on his own account, and partly exploring onj 
behalf of another, Richard Henderson. Hender- 
son was a prominent citizen of North Carolina, ^^ aj 
speculative man of great ambition and energy. 

^ The inscription is first mentioned by Ramsey, p. 67. Seel 
Appendix C, for a letter from the Hon. John Allison, at present 
(1888) Secretary of State for Tennessee, which goes to prove! 
that the inscription has been on the tree as long as the dis-j 
trict has been settled. Of course, it cannot be proved that! 
the inscription is by Boon; but there is much reason for] 
supposing that such is the case, and little for doubting it. 

' He was by birth a Virginian, of mixed Scotch and Welsh j 
descent. See Collins, ii., 336; also Ramsey. For Boon's early j 
connection with Henderson, in 1764, sec Haywood, 35. 



Boon and the Long Iluntcrs i6 



J 



He stood high in the colony, was extravagant 
and fond of display, and his fortune being jeop- 
ardized, he hoped to more than retrieve it by 
going into speculation in western lands on an 
unheard-of scale ; for he intended to try to es- 
tablish on his own account a great proprietary 
colony beyond the mountains. He had great 
confidence in Boon ; and it was his backing which 
enabled the latter to turn his discoveries to such 
good account. 

Boon's claim to distinction rests not so much 
on his wide wanderings in unknown lands, for in 
this respect he did little more than was done by a 
hundred other backwoods hunters of his genera- 
tion, but on the fact that he was able to turn his 
daring woodcraft to the advantage of his fellows. 
As he himself said, he was an instrument "or- 
dained of God to settle the wilderness." He in- 
spired confidence in all who met him,' so that the 
men of means and influence were willing to trust 
adventurous enterprises to his care; and his suc- 
cess as an explorer, his skill as a hunter, and his 
prowess as an Indian fighter, enabled him to bring 
these enterprises to a successful conclusion, and in 
some degree to control the wild spirits associated 
with him. 

' Even among his foes ; he is almost the only American 
praised by Lt.-Gov. Henry Hamilton of Detroit, for instance 
(see Royal Gazette, July 15, 1780). 



1 64 The Winning of the West 

Boon's expeditions into the edges of the wilder- 
ness whetted his appetite for the unknown. He 
had heard of great hunting-grounds in the far in- 
terior from a stray hunter and Indian trader/ who 
had himself seen them, and on May i, 1769, he left 
his home on the Yadkin ' ' to wander through the 
wilderness of America in quest of the country of 
Kentucky." '^ He was accompanied by five other 
men, including his informant, and struck out to- 
wards the Northwest, through the tangled mass of 
rugged mountains and gloomy forests. During 
five weeks of severe toil the little band journeyed 
through vast solitudes, whose utter loneliness can 
with difficulty be understood by those who have 
not themselves dwelt and hunted in primeval 
mountain forests. Then, early in June, the ad- 
venturers broke through the interminable wastes 
of dim woodland, and stood on the threshold of 
the beautiful blue-grass region of Kentucky ; a land 
of running waters, of groves and glades, of prairies, 
canebrakes, and stretches of lofty forest. It was 

' John Finley. 

^ The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon, formerly a hunter; 
nominally written by Boon himself, in 1784, but in reality by 
John Filson, the first Kentucky historian, — a man who did 
history a good service, albeit a true sample of the small hedge- 
school pedant. The old pioneer's own language would have 
been far better than that which Filson used; for the latter 's 
composition is a travesty of Johnsonese in its most aggravated 
form. l"or Filson see Durrctt's admirable Life in the Filson 
Club Publications. 



Boon and the Long Hunters 165 

teeming with game. The shaggy-maned herds of 
unwieldly buffalo — the bison, as they should be 
called — had beaten out broad roads through the 
forests, and had furrowed the prairies with trails 
along which they had travelled for countless gen- 
erations. The round-horned elk, with spreading, 
massive antlers, the lordliest of the deer tribe 
throughout the world, abounded, and like the 
buffalo travelled in bands not only through the 
woods but also across the reaches of waving grass- 
land. The deer were extraordinarily numerous, 
and so were bears, while wolves and panthers were 
plentiful. Wherever there was a salt spring the 
country was fairly thronged with wild beasts of 
many kinds. For six months Boon and his com- 
panions enjoyed such hunting as had hardly fallen 
to men of their race since the Germans came out of 
the Hercynian forest.^ 

^ The Nieblung Lied tells of Siegfried's feats with bear, 
buffalo, elk, wolf, and deer: 

" Danach schlug er wieder einen Buflfel und einen Elk 
Vier starkes Auer nieder und einen grimmen Schelk, 
So schnell trug ihn die Mahre, dasz ihm nichts entsprang; 
Hinden iind Hirsche wurden viele sein Fang. 

ein Waldthier fiirchterlich, 

Einen wilden Baren." 

Siegfried's elk was our moose; and, like the American fron- 
tiersmen of to-day, the old German singer calls the Wisent 
or bison a buffalo — European sportsmen now committing an 
equally bad blunder by giving it the name of the extinct 



i66 The Winnine of the West 



& 



In December, however, they were attacked by 
Indians. Boon and a companion were captured; 
and when they escaped they found their camp 
broken up, and the rest of the party scattered and 
gone home. About this time they were joined by 
Squire Boon, the brother of the great hunter, and 
himself a woodsman of but little less skill, together 
with another adventurer; the two had travelled 
through the immense wilderness, partly to explore 
it and partly with the hope of finding the original 
adventurers, which they finally succeeded in doing 
more by good luck than design. Soon afterwards 
Boon's companion in his first short captivity was 
again surprised by the Indians, and this time was 
slain ' — the first of the thousands of human beings 
with whose life-blood Kentucky was bought. The 
attack was entirely unprovoked. The Indians had 
wantonly shed the first blood. The land belonged 
to no one tribe, but was hunted over by all, each 
feeling jealous of every other intruder; they at- 
tacked the whites, not because the whites had 
wronged them, but because their invariable policy 
was to kill any strangers on any grounds over 
which they themselves ever hunted, no matter 
what man had the best right thereto. The Ken- 
aurochs. Be it observed also that the hard fighting, hard 
drinking, boastful hero of Nieblung fame used a "spiir hund" 
just as his representative of Kentucky or Tennessee used a 
trackhound a thousand years later. 

' His name was John Stewart. 



Boon and the Long Hunters 167 

tucky hunters were promptly taught that in this 
No-man's land, teeming with game and lacking 
even a solitary human habitation, every Indian 
must be regarded as a foe. 

The man who had accompanied Squire Boon 
was terrified by the presence of the Indians, and 
now returned to the settlements. The two 
brothers remained alone on their hunting-grounds 
throughout the winter, living in a little cabin. 
About the first of j\Iay Squire set off alone to the 
settlements to procure horses and ammunition. 
For three months Daniel Boon remained abso- 
lutely alone in the wilderness, without salt, sugar, 
or flour, and without the companionship of so 
much as a horse or a dog.' But the solitude-loving 
hunter, dauntless and self-reliant, enjoyed to the 
full his wild, lonely life; he passed his days hunt- 
ing and exploring, wandering hither and thither 
over the country, while at night he lay off in 

^ His remaining absolutely alone in the wilderness for such 
a length of time is often spoken of with wonder; but here 
again Boon stands merely as the backwoods type, not as an 
exception. To this day many hunters in the Rockies do the 
same. In 1880, two men whom I knew wintered to the west 
of the Bighorns, 150 miles from any human beings. They 
had salt and flour, however; but they were nine months 
without seeing a white face. They killed elk, buffalo, and a 
moose; and had a narrow escape from a small Indian war 
party. Last winter (1887-8S) an old trapper, a friend of 
mine in the days when he hunted buffalo, spent five months 
entirely alone in the mountains north of the Flathead country. 



1 68 The Winning of the West 

the canebrake or thickets, without a fire, so as 
not to attract the Indians. Of the latter he saw 
many signs, and they sometimes came into his 
camp, but his sleepless wariness enabled him to 
avoid capture. 

Late in July, his brother returned, and met him 
according to appointment at the old camp. Other 
hunters also now came into the Kentucky wilder- 
ness, and Boon joined a small party of them for a 
short time. Such a party of hunters is always 
glad to have anything wherewith to break the 
irksome monotony of the long evenings passed 
round the camp-fire ; and a book or a greasy pack 
of cards was as welcome in a camp of Kentucky 
riflemen in 1 7 70 as it is to a party of Rocky Moun- 
tain hunters in 1888. Boon has recorded in his 
own quaint phraseology an incident of his life 
during this summer, which shows how eagerly such 
a little band of frontiersmen read a book, and how 
real its characters became to their minds. He 
was encamped with five other men on Red River, 
and they had with them for their ' ' amusement the 
history of Samuel Gulliver's travels, wherein he 
gave an account of his young master, Glumdelick, 
careing [sic] him on a market day for a show to a 
town called Lulbegrud." In the party who, amid 
such strange surroundings, read and listened to 
Dean Swift's writings was a young man named 
Alexander Neely. One night he came into camp 



Boon and the Long Hunters 169 

with two Indian scalps, taken from a Shawnese 
village he had found on a creek running into the 
river; and he announced to the circle of grim 
wilderness veterans that "he had been that day 
to Lulbegrud, and had killed two Brobdignags 
in their capital." To this day the creek by which 
the two luckless Shawnees lost their lives is known 
as Lulbegrud Creek/ 

Soon after this encounter the increasing danger 
from the Indians drove Boon back to the valley 
of the Cumberland River, and, in the spring of 
1 771, he returned to his home on the Yadkin. 

A couple of years before Boon went to Kentucky, 
Steiner, or Stoner, and Harrod, two hunters from 

^ Deposition of Daniel Boon, September 15, 1796. Certi- 
fied copy from Deposition Book No. i, page 156, Clark 
County Court, Ky. First published by Colonel John Mason 
Brown, in Battle of the Blue Licks, p. 40 (Frankfort, 1882). 
The book which these old hunters read arotmd their camp- 
fire in the Indian-haiuited primeval forest a century and a 
quarter ago has by great good luck been preserved, and is in 
Colonel Durrett's Hbrary at Louisville. It is entitled the 
Works of Dr. Jonathan Swift, London, MDCCLXV., and is 
in two small volumes. On the title page is written "A- 
Neelly, 1770." 

Frontiersmen are often content with the merest printed 
trash; but the better men among them appreciate really 
good literature quite as much as any other class of people. In 
the long winter evenings they study to good purpose books as 
varied as Dante, Josephus, Macaulay, Longfellow, Parton's 
Life of Jackson, and the Rollo stories — to mention only 
volumes that have been especial favorites with my own cow- 
boys and hiuiters. 



I70 The Winning of the West 

Pittsburg, who had passed through the llHnois, 
came down to hunt in the bend of the Cumber- 
land, where Nashville now stands; they found 
vast numbers of buffalo, and killed a great many, 
especially around the licks, where the huge clumsy 
beasts had fairly destroyed most of the forest, 
treading down the young trees and bushes till the 
ground was left bare or covered with a rich growth 
of clover. The bottoms and the hollows between 
the hills were thickset with cane. Sycamore grew 
in the low groimd, and towards the Mississippi 
were to be found the persimmon and cottonwood. 
Sometimes the forest was open and composed of 
huge trees; elsewhere it was of thicker, smaller 
growth.' Everywhere game abounded, and it 
was nowhere very wary. 

Other hunters, of whom we know even the names 
of only a few, had been through many parts of the 
wilderness before Boon, and earlier still French- 
men had built forts and smelting furnaces on the 
Cumberland, the Tennessee,^ and the head tribu- 

' MS. diary of Benjamin Hawkins, 1796. Preserved in 
Nashville Historical Society. In 1796, buffalo were scarce; 
but some fresh signs of them were still seen at licks. 

^ Haywood, p. 75, etc. It is a waste of time to quarrel over 
who first discovered a particular tract of this wilderness. A 
great many hunters traversed different parts at different 
times, from 1760 on, each practically exploring on his own 
account. We do not know the names of most of them ; those 
we do know are only worth preserving in cotmty histories 
and the like ; the credit belongs to the race, not the individual. 



Boon and the Long Hunters 171 

taries of the Kentucky. Boon is interesting as a 
leader and explorer ; but he is still more interesting 
as a type. The West was neither discovered, won, 
nor settled by any single man. No keen-eyed 
statesman planned the movement, nor was it 
carried out by any great military leader; it was 
the work of a whole people, of whom each man was 
impelled mainly by sheer love of adventure; it 
was the outcome of the ceaseless strivings of all 
the dauntless, restless backwoods folk to win homes 
for their descendants and to each penetrate deeper 
than his neighbors into the remote forest hunting- 
grounds where the perilous pleasures of the chase 
and of war could be best enjoyed. We owe the 
conquest of the West to all the baclavoodsmen, not 
to any solitary individual among them ; where all 
alike were strong and daring there was no chance 
for any single man to rise to unquestioned pre- 
eminence. 

In the summer of 1769 a large band of hunters ' 
crossed the mountains to make a long hunt in the 
western wilderness, the men clad in hunting-shirts, 
moccasins, and leggings, with traps, rifles, and 
dogs, and each bringing with him two or three 

^ From twenty to forty. Compare Haywood and Marshall, 
both of whom are speaking of the same bodies of men ; Ram- 
sey makes the mistake of supposing they are speaking of 
different parties; Haywood dwells on the feats of those who 
descended the Cumberland; Marshall of those who went to 
Kentucky. 



172 The Winning of the West 



horses. They made their way over the mountains, 
forded or swam the rapid, timber-choked streams, 
and went down the Cumberland, till at last they 
broke out of the forest and came upon great bar- 
rens of tall grass. One of their number was killed 
by a small party of Indians; but they saw no 
signs of human habitations. Yet they came across 
mounds and graves and other remains of an 
ancient people who had once lived in the land, but 
had died out of it long ages before the incoming of 
the white men.^ 

The hunters made a permanent camp in one 
place, and returned to it at intervals to deposit 
their skins and peltries. Between times they 
scattered out singly or in small bands. They 
hunted all through the year, killing vast quantities 
of every kind of game. Most of it they got by fair 
still-hunting, but some by methods we do not now 
consider legitimate, such as calling up a doe by 
imitating the bleat of a fawn, and shooting deer 
from a scaffold when they came to the salt licks at 
night. Nevertheless, most of the hunters did not 
approve of "crusting" the game — that is, of run- 
ning it down on snow-shoes in the deep mid- 
winter snows. 

At the end of the year some of the adventurers 
returned home ; others went north into the Ken- 

' The so-called mound-builders; now generally considered 
to have been simply the ancestors of the present Indian races. 



Boon and the Long Hunters 173 

tucky country/ where they hunted for several 
months before recrossing the mountains; while 
the remainder, led by an old hunter named Kasper 
Mansker,^ built two boats and hollowed out of logs 
two pirogues or dugouts — clumsier but tougher 
craft than the light birch-bark canoes — and started 
down the Cumberland. At the French Lick, where 
Nashville now stands, they saw enormous quan- 
tities of buffalo, elk, and other game, more than 
they had ever seen before in any one place. Some 
of their goods were taken by a party of Indians 
they met, but some French traders whom they 
likewise encountered, treated them well and gave 
them salt, flour, tobacco, and taffla, the last being 
especially prized, as they had had no spirits for a 
year. They went down to Natchez, sold their furs, 
hides, oil, and tallow, and some returned by sea 
while others, including Mansker, came overland 
with a drove of horses that was being taken 
through the Indian nations to Georgia. From the 
length of time all these men, as well as Boon and 
his companions, were absent, they were known as 
the Long Hunters, ^ and the fame of their himting 

^ Led by one James Knox. 

2 His real name was Kasper Mansker as his signattire shows, 
but he was always spoken of as Mansco. 

3 McAfee MSS. {Autobiography of Robert McAfee). Some- 
times the term " Long Hunters " was used as including Boon, 
Finley, and their companions, sometimes not; in the McAfee 
MSS. it is explicitly used in the former sense. 



174 The Winning of the West 

and exploring spread all along the border and 
greatly excited the young men. 

In 1 7 7 1 , many hunters crossed over the moun- 
tains and penetrated far into the wilderness, to 
work huge havoc among the herds of game. Some 
of them came in bands, and others singly, and 
many of the mountains, lakes, rivers, and creeks 
of Tennessee are either called after the leaders 
among these old hunters and wanderers, or else by 
their names perpetuate the memory of some inci- 
dent of their hunting trips.' 

Mansker himself came back, a leader among his 
comrades, and hunted many years in the woods 
alone or with others of his kind, and saw and did 
many strange things. One winter he and those 
who were with him built a skin-house from the 
hides of game, and when their ammunition gave 
out they left three of their number and all of their 
dogs at the skin house and went to the settlements 
for powder and lead. When they returned they 
found that two of the men had been killed and the 
other chased away by the Indians, who, however, 
had not found the camp. The dogs, having seen 
no human face for three months, were very wild, 
yet in a few days became as tame and well trained 
as ever. They killed such enormous quantities of 
buffalo, elk, and especially deer, that they could 

' See Haywood for Clinch River, Drake's Pond, Mansco's 
Lick, Greasy Rock, etc. 



Boon and the Long Hunters 175 

not pack the hides into camp, and one of the party, 
during an idle moment and in a spirit of protest 
against fate,' carved on the peeled trunk of a 
fallen poplar, where it long remained, the sentence : 
" 2300 deer skins lost; ruination by God!" The 
soul of this thrifty hunter must have been further 
grieved when a party of Cherokees visited their 
camp and took away all the camp utensils and five 
hundred hides. The whites found the broad track 
they made in coming in, but could not find where 
they had gone out, each wily redskin then cover- 
ing his own trail, and the whole number appa- 
rently breaking up into several parties. 

Sometimes the Indians not only plundered the 
hunting camps but killed the himters as well, and 
the hunters retaliated in kind. Often the white 
men and red fought one another whenever they 
met, and displayed in their conflicts all the cunning 
and merciless ferocity that made forest warfare so 
dreadful. Terrible deeds of prowess were done by 
the mighty men on either side. It was a war of 
stealth and cruelty, and ceaseless, sleepless watch- 
fulness. The contestants had sinewy frames and 
iron wills, keen eyes and steady hands, hearts as 
bold as they were ruthless. Their moccasined feet 
made no sound as they stole softly on the camp 
of a sleeping enemy or crept to ambush him while 
he himself still-hunted or waylaid the deer. A 
^ A hunter named Bledsoe. Collins, ii., 418. 



i;^ The Winning- of the West 



t> 



favorite stratagem was to imitate the call of game, 
especially the gobble of the wild turkey, 'and thus 
to lure the would-be hunter to his fate. If the 
deceit was guessed at, the caller was himself 
stalked. The men grew wonderfully expert in 
detecting imitation. One old hunter, Castleman 
by name, was in after years fond of describing how 
an Indian nearly lured him to his death. It was in 
the dusk of the evening, when he heard the cries 
of two great wood owls near him. Listening at- 
tentively, he became convinced that all was not 
right. "The woo-woo call and the woo-w^oo an- 
swer were not well timed and toned, and the babel- 
chatter was a failure. More than this, they seemed 
to be on the ground." Creeping cautiously up, 
and peering through the brush, he saw something 
the height of a stump between two forked trees. 
It did not look natural ; he aimed, pulled trigger, 
and killed an Indian. 

Each party of Indians or whites was ever on the 
watch to guard against danger or to get the chance 
of taking vengeance for former wrongs. The dark 
woods saw a myriad lonely fights where red 
warrior or white hunter fell and no friend of the 
fallen ever knew his fate, where his sole memorial 
was the scalp that hung in the smoky cabin or 
squalid wigwam of the victor. 

The rude and fragmentary annals of the frontier 
are filled with the deeds of men, of whom Mansker 



Boon and the Long Hunters 177 

can be taken as a type. He was a wonderful 
marksman and woodsman, and was afterwards 
made a colonel of the frontier militia, though, 
being of German descent, he spoke only broken 
English.' Like most of the hunters he became 
specially proud of his rifle, calling it "Nancy"; 
for they were very apt to know each his favorite 
weapon by some homely or endearing nickname. 
Every forest sight or sound was familiar to him. 
He knew the cries of the birds and beasts so well 
that no imitation could deceive him. Once he 
was nearly taken in by an unusually perfect imi- 
tation of a wild gobbler; but he finally became 
suspicious, and "placed" his adversary behind a 
large tree. Having perfect confidence in his rifle, 
and knowing that the Indians rarely fired except at 
close range — partly because they were poor shots, 
partly because they loaded their guns too lightly 
— he made no attempt to hide. Feigning to pass 
to the Indian's right, the latter, as he expected, 
tried to follow him; reaching an opening in a 
glade, Mansker suddenly wheeled and killed his 
foe. When hunting he made his home sometimes 
in a hollow tree, sometimes in a hut of buffalo- 
hides; for the buffalo were so plenty that once 
when a lick was discovered by himself and a com- 
panion,^ the latter, though on horseback, was 

^ Carr'sEarly Times m Middle Tennessee, pp. 52, 54, 56, etc. 
^ The htmter Bledsoe mentioned in a previous note. 



VOL. I. — 12. 



178 The Winning of the West 

nearly trampled to death by the mad rush of a 
herd they surprised and stampeded. 

He was a famous Indian fighter; one of the 
earliest of his recorded deeds has to do with an 
Indian adventure. He and three other men were 
trapping on Sulphur Fork and Red River, in the 
great bend of the Cumberland. Moving their 
camp, they came on recent traces of Indians : deer- 
carcasses and wicker frames for stretching hides. 
They feared to tarry longer unless they knew 
something of their foes, and Mansker set forth to 
explore, and turned towards Red River, where, 
from the sign, he thought to find the camp. 
Travelling some twenty miles, he perceived by the 
sycamore trees in view that he was near the river. 
Advancing a few steps farther he suddenly found 
himself within eighty or ninety yards of the camp. 
He instantly slipped behind a tree to watch. 
There were only two Indians in camp ; the rest he 
supposed were hunting at a distance. Just as he 
was about to retire, one of the Indians took up a 
tomahawk and strolled off in the opposite direc- 
tion ; while the other picked up his gun, put it on 
his shoulder, and walked directly towards Man- 
sker's hiding-place. Mansker lay close, hoping 
that he would not be noticed ; but the Indian ad- 
vanced directly towards him until not fifteen paces 
off. There being no alternative, Mansker cocked 
his piece, and shot the Indian through the body. 



Boon and the Long Hunters 179 

The Indian screamed, threw down his gun, and ran 
towards camp; passing it he pitched headlong 
down the bluff, dead, into the river. The other 
likewise ran to camp at the sound of the shot ; but 
Mansker outran him, reached the camp first, and 
picked up an old gun that was on the ground ; but 
the gun would not go off, and the Indian turned 
and escaped. Mansker broke the old gun, and re- 
turned speedily to his comrades. The next day 
they all went to the spot, where they found the 
dead Indian and took away his tomahawk, knife, 
and bullet-bag; but they never found his gun. 
The other Indian had come back, had loaded his 
horses with furs, and was gone. They followed 
him all that day and all night with a torch of dry 
cane, and could never overtake him. Finding 
that there were other bands of Indians about, 
they then left their himting-grounds. Towards 
the close of his life old Mansker, like many another 
fearless and ignorant backwoods fighter, became 
so much impressed by the fiery earnestness and 
zeal of the Methodists that he joined himself to 
them, and became a strong and helpful prop of the 
community whose first foxmdations he had helped 
to lay. 

Sometimes the hunters met Creole trappers, who 
sent their tallow, hides, and furs in pirogues and 
bateaux down the Mississippi to Natchez or 
Orleans, instead of having to transport them on 



i8o The Winning of the West 

pack-horses through the perilous forest-tracks 
across the mountains. They had to encounter 
dangers from beasts as well as men. More than 
once we hear of one who, in a canebrake or tangled 
thicket, was mangled to death by the horns and 
hoofs of a wounded buffalo.^ All of the wild 
beasts were then comparatively unused to contact 
with rifle-bearing hunters; they were, in conse- 
quence, much more ferocious and ready to attack 
man than at present. The bear were the most 
numerous of all, after the deer ; their chase was a 
favorite sport. There was just enough danger in 
it to make it exciting, for though himters were 
frequently bitten or clawed, they were hardly ever 
killed. The wolves were generally very wary ; yet 
in rare instances they, too, were dangerous. The 
panther was a much more dreaded foe, and lives 
were sometimes lost in hunting him; but even 
with the panther, the cases where the hunter was 
killed were very exceptional. 

The hunters were in their lives sometimes clean 
and straight, and sometimes immoral, with a gross 
and uncouth viciousness. We read of one party of 
six men and a woman, who were encountered on 
the Cumberland River; the woman acted as the 
wife of a man named Big John, but deserted him 
for one of his companions, and when he fell sick 
persuaded the whole party to leave him in the 

^ As Haywood, 8i. 



Boon and the Long Hunters i8i 



wilderness to die of disease and starvation. Yet 
those who left him did not in the end fare bet- 
ter, for they were ambushed and cut off, when 
they had gone down to Natchez, apparently by 
Indians. 

At first the hunters, with their small-bore rifles, 
were unsuccessful in killing buffalo. Once, when 
George Rogers Clark had long resided in Ken- 
tucky, he and two companions discovered a camp 
of some forty new-comers actually starving, 
though buffalo were plenty. Clark and his 
friends speedily relieved their necessities by kill- 
ing fourteen of the great beasts; for when once 
the hunters had found out the knack, the buffalo 
were easier slaughtered than any other game.^ 

The hunters were the pioneers; but close be- 
hind them came another set of explorers quite as 
hardy and resolute. These were the surveyors. 
The men of chain and compass played a part in 
the exploration of the West scarcely inferior to 
that of the heroes of axe and rifle. Often, indeed, 
the parts were combined ; Boon himself was a 

^ This continued to be the case until the buffalo "vere all 
destroyed. When my cattle came to the Little Missouri in 
1882, buffalo were plenty; my men killed nearly a hundred 
that winter, though tending the cattle; yet an inexperienced 
hunter not far from us, though a hardy plainsman, killed 
only three in the whole time. See also Parkman's Oregon 
Trail for an instance of a party of Missouri backwoodsmen 
who made a characteristic failure in an attempt on a buffalo 
band. 



1 82 The Winning of the West 

surveyor.' Vast tracts of western land were con- 
tinually being allotted either to actual settlers or 
as bounties to soldiers who had served against the 
French and Indians. These had to be explored 
and mapped, and as there was much risk as well 
as reward in the task it naturally proved attract- 
ive to all adventurous young men who had some 
education, a good deal of ambition, and not too 
much fortune. A great number of young men of 
good families, like Washington and Clark, went 
into the business. Soon after the return of Boon 
and the Long Hunters, parties of surveyors came 
down the Ohio,^ mapping out its course and ex- 
ploring the Kentucky lands that lay beside it.^ 

Among the hunters, surveyors, and explorers 
who came into the wilderness in 1773 was a band 
led by three young men named McAfee, — typical 
backwoodsmen, hardy, adventurous, their frontier 
recklessness and license tempered by the Calvinism 
they had learned in their rough log home. They 
were fond of hunting, but they came to spy out the 
land and see if it could be made into homes for 
their children; and in their party were several 
surveyors. They descended the Ohio in dugout 

' See Appendix D. 

' An English engineer made a rude survey or table of 
distances of the Ohio in 1766. 

3 Collins states that in 1770 and 1772 Washington surveyed 
small tracts in what is now northeastern Kentucky; but this 
is more than doubtful. 



Boon and the Long Hunters 183 

canoes, with their rifles, blankets, tomahawks, and 
fishing-tackle. They met some Shawnees and got 
on well with them; but while their leader was 
visiting the chief, Cornstalk, and listening to his 
fair speeches at his town of old Chillicothe, the 
rest of the party were startled to see a band of 
young Shawnee braves returning from a successful 
foray on the settlements, driving before them the 
laden pack-horses they had stolen. ' 

They explored part of Kentucky, and visited the 
different licks. One, long named Big Bone Lick, 
was famous because there were scattered about it 
in incredible quantity the gigantic remains of the 
extinct mastodon; the McAfees made a tent by 
stretching their blankets over the huge fossil ribs, 
and used the disjointed vertebrae as stools on which 
to sit. Game of many kinds thronged the spaces 
round the licks ; herds of buffalo, elk, and deer, as 
well as bears and wolves, were all in sight at once. 
The ground round about some of them was trod- 
den down so that there was not as much grass left 
as would feed a sheep ; and the game trails were 
like streets, or the beaten roads round a city. A 
little village to this day recalls by its name the fact 
that it stands on a former " stamping ground" of 
the buffalo. At one lick the explorers met with 
what might have proved a serious adventure. 

I All of this is taken from the McAfee MSS., in Colonel 
Durrett's Ubrary. 



1 84 The Winning of the West 

One of the McAfees and a companion were passing 
round its outskirts, when some others of the party 
fired at a gang of buffaloes, which stampeded 
directly towards the two. While his companion 
scampered up a leaning mulberry bush, McAfee, 
less agile, leaped behind a tree-trunk, where he 
stood sideways till the buffalo passed, their horns 
scraping off the bark on either side; then he 
looked round to see his friend "hanging in the 
mulberry bush like a coon." ' 

When the party left this lick they followed a 
buffalo trail, beaten out in the forest, " the size of 
the wagon road leading out of WilHamsburg, " 
then the capital of Virginia. It crossed the Ken- 
tucky River at a riffle below where Frankfort 
now stands. Thence they started homewards 
across the Cumberland Mountains, and suffered 
terribly while making their way through the 
"desolate and voiceless solitudes"; mere wastes 
of cliffs, crags, caverns, and steep hillsides covered 
with pine, laurel, and underbrush. Twice they 
were literally starving and were saved in the nick 
of time by the killing, on the first occasion, of a big 
bull elk — on the next, of a small spike buck. At 
last, sun-scorched and rain-beaten, foot-sore and 
leg-weary, their thighs torn to pieces by the stout 

^ McAfee MSS. A similar adventure befell my brother 
Elliott and my cousin John Roosevelt while they were hunt- 
ing buffalo on the staked plains of Texas in 1S77. 



Boon and the Long Hunters 185 

briars/ and their feet and hands bHstered and 
scalded, they came out in Powell's Valley, and 
followed the well-worn hunter's trail across it. 
Thence it was easy to reach home, where the tale 
of their adventures excited still more the young 
frontiersmen. 

Their troubles were ended for the time being; 
but in Powell's Valley they met other wanderers 
whose toil and peril had just begun. There they 
encountered the company ^ which Daniel Boon 
was just leading across the moimtains, with the 
hope of making a permanent settlement in the far 
distant Kentucky. ^ Boon had sold his farm on 
the Yadkin and all the goods he could not carry 
with him, and in September, 1773, he started for 
Kentucky with his wife and his children; five 
families, and forty men besides, went with him, 
driving their horses and cattle. It was the first 
attempt that was made to settle a region separated 
by long stretches of wilderness from the already 
inhabited districts; and it was doomed to failure. 
On approaching the gloomy and forbidding defiles 
of the Cumberland Mountains the party was at- 
tacked by Indians. "^ Six of the men, including 
Boon's eldest son, were slain, and the cattle 

' They evidently wore breech-clouts and leggings, not 
trousers. ^ McAfee MSS. 3 Filson's Boon. 

4 October lo, 1773, Filson's Boon. The McAfee MSS. speak 
of meeting Boon in Powell's Valley and getting home in Sep- 
tember; if so, it must have been the very end of the month. 



1 86 The Winning of the West 

scattered ; and though the backwoodsmen ralHed 
and repulsed their assailants, yet they had suffered 
such loss and damage that they retreated and took 
up their abode temporarily on the Clinch River. 

In the same year Simon Kenton, afterwards 
famous as a scout and Indian fighter, in company 
with other hunters, wandered through Kentucky. 
Kenton, like every one else, was astounded at the 
beauty and fertility of the land and the innumer- 
able herds of buffalo, elk, and other game that 
thronged the trampled ground around the licks. 
One of his companions was taken by the Indians, 
who burned him alive. 

In the following year numerous parties of sur- 
veyors visited the land. One of these was headed 
by John Floyd, who was among the ablest of 
the Kentucky pioneers, and afterwards played a 
prominent part in the young commonwealth, until 
his death at the hands of the savages. Floyd was 
at the time assistant-surveyor of Fincastle County ; 
and his party went out for the purpose of making 
surveys "by virtue of the Governor's warrant for 
officers and soldiers on the Ohio and its waters." ^ 

^ The account of this journey of Floyd and his companions 
is taken from a very interesting MS. journal, kept by one of 
the party — Thomas Hanson. It was furnished me, together 
with other valuable papers, through the courtesy of Mr. and 
Mrs. Daniel Trigg, of Abingdon, Va., and of Dr. George Ben. 
Johnston, of Richmond, to whom J take this opportunity of 
returning my warm thanks. 



Boon and the Long Hunters 187 

They started on April 9, 1774, — eight men in 
all, — from their homes in Fincastle Coimty.' 
They went down the Kanawha in a canoe, shooting 
bear and deer, and catching great pike and catfish. 
The first survey they made was one of two thou- 
sand acres for "Colo. Washington"-; and they 
made another for Patrick Henry. On the way 
they encountered other parties of surveyors, and 
learned that an Indian war was threatened ; for a 
party of thirteen would-be settlers on the upper 
Ohio had been attacked, but had repelled their 
assailants, and in consequence the Shawnees had 
declared for war, and threatened thereafter to kill 
the Virginians and rob the Pennsylvanians wher- 
ever they found them.^ The reason for this dis- 
crimination in favor of the citizens of the Quaker 
State was that the Virginians with whom the 
Indians came chiefly in contact were settlers, 
whereas the Pennsylvanians were traders. The 

^ From the house of Colonel William Preston, "at one 
o'clock, in high spirits." They took the canoe at the mouth 
of Elk River, on the sixteenth. Most of the diary is, of 
course, taken up with notes on the character and fertility of 
the lands, and memoranda of the surveys made. Especial 
comment is made on a burning spring by the Kanawha, which 
is dubbed "one of the wonders of the world." 

^ They received this news on April 17th, and confirma- 
tion thereof on the 19th. The dates should be kept in mind, 
as they show that the Shawnees had begun hostilities from 
a fortnight to a month before Cresap's attack and the murder 
of Logan's family, which will be described hereafter. 



1 88 The Winning of the West 

marked difference in the way the savages looked 
at the two classes received additional emphasis in 
Lord Dunmore's war. 

At the mouth of the Kanawha ^ the adventurers 
found twenty or thirty men gathered together; 
some had come to settle, but most wished to ex- 
plore or survey the lands. All were in high spirits, 
and resolute to go to Kentucky, in spite of Indian 
hostilities. Some of them joined Floyd, and 
raised his party to eighteen men, who started 
down the Ohio in four canoes.^ They found "a 
battoe loaded with corn," apparently abandoned, 
and took about three bushels with them. Other 
parties joined them from time to time, as they 
paddled and drifted down the stream ; and one or 
two of their own number, alarmed by further news 
of Indian hostilities, went back. Once they met 
a party of Delawares, by whom they were not mo- 
lested ; and again, two or three of their numbers 
encountered a couple of hostile savages; and 
though no one was hurt, the party was kept on 
the watch all the time. They marvelled much at 
the great trees — one sycamore was thirty-seven 
feet in circumference, — and on a Sunday, which 
they kept as a day of rest, they examined with in- 
terest the forest-covered embankments of a fort 
at the mouth of the Scioto, a memorial of the 



* Which they reached on the twentieth. 
' On the twenty-second. 



Boon and the Long Hunters 189 

mound-builders who had vanished centuries be- 
fore. 

When they reached the mouth of the Kentucky ' 
they found two Delawares and a squaw, to whom 
they gave corn and salt. Here they split up, and 
Floyd and his original party spent a week in the 
neighborhood, surveying land, going some dis- 
tance up the Kentucky to a salt lick, where they 
saw a herd of three hundred buffalo. " They then 
again embarked, and drifted down the Ohio. On 
May 26th they met two Delawares in a canoe fly- 
ing a red flag ; they had been sent down the river 
with a pass from the commandant at Fort Pitt to 
gather their hunters and get them home, in view 
of the threatened hostilities between the Shaw- 
nees and Virginians. ^ The actions of the two 
Indians were so suspicious, and the news they 

^ On May 13th. 

2 There were quarrels among the surveyors. The entry for 
May 13th runs: "Our company divided, eleven men went up 
to Harrad's company one hundred miles up the Cantucky or 
Louisa river (n. b. one Capt. Harrad has been there many 
months building a kind of Town &c) in order to make im- 
provements. This day a quarrel arose betwf.een Mr. Lee and 
Mr. Hyte; Lee cut a Stick and gave Hyte a Whiping with it, 
upon which Mr. Floyd demanded the King's Peace which 
stopt it sooner than it would have ended if he had not been 
there." 

3 They said that in a skirmish the whites had killed thirteen 
Shawnees, two Mingoes, and one Delaware (this may or may 
not mean the massacres by Cresap and Greathouse, see, post, 
chapter on Lord Dtmmore's War). 



iQO The Winning of the West 

brought was so alarming, that some of Floyd's 
companions became greatly alarmed, and wished 
to go straight on down the Mississippi ; but Floyd 
swore that he would finish his work unless actually 
forced off. Three days afterwards they reached 
the Falls. 

Here Floyd spent a fortnight, making surveys in 
every direction, and then started off to explore the 
land between the Salt River and the Kentucky. 
Like the others, he carried his own pack, which 
consisted of little but his blanket and his instru- 
ments. He sometimes had difficulties with his 
men. One of them refused to carry the chain one 
day, and went off to hunt, got lost, and was not 
foimd for thirty-six hours. Another time it was 
noticed that two of the hunters had become sullen, 
and seemed anxious to leave camp. The following 
morning, while on the march, the party killed an 
elk and halted for breakfast ; but the two hunters 
walked on, and, says the journal, "we never saw 
them more"; but whether they got back to the 
settlements or perished in the wilderness, none 
could tell. 

The party suffered much hardship. Floyd fell 
sick, and for three days could not travel. They 
gave him an "Indian sweat," probably building 
just such a little sweat-house as the Indians use to 
this day. Others of their number at different 
times fell ill ; and they were ever on the watch for 



Boon and the Long Hunters 191 

Indians. In the vast forests, every sign of a 
human being was the sign of a probable enemy. 
Once they heard a gun, and another time a sound 
as of a man caUing to another; and on each 
occasion they redoubled their caution, keeping 
guard as they rested, and at night extinguishing 
their camp-fire and sleeping a mile or two from it. 
They built a bark canoe in which to cross the 
Kentucky, and on the ist of July they met another 
party of surveyors on the banks of that stream.^ 
Two or three days afterwards, Floyd and three 
companions left the others, agreeing to meet them 
on August ist, at a cabin built by a man named 
Harwood, on the south side of the Kentucky, a 
few miles from the mouth of the Elkhorn. For 
three weeks they surveyed and hunted, enchanted 
with the beauty of the country.^ They then 
went to the cabin, several days before the ap- 
pointed time; but to their surprise found every- 
thing scattered over the ground, and two fires 
burning, while on a tree near the landing was 
written, "Alarmed by finding some people killed 

^ Where the journal says the land "is like a paradise, it is 
so good and beautiful." 

' The journal for July 8th says: " The Land is so good that 
I cannot give it its due Praise. The undergrowth is Clover, 
Pea- vine, Cane & Nettles; intermingled with Rich Weed. 
It's timber is Honey Locust, Black Walnut, Sugar Tree, 
Hickory, Iron-Wood, Hoop Wood, Mulberry, Ash and Elm 
and some Oak." And later it dwells on the high limestone 
cliffs facing the river on both sides. 



192 The Winning of the West 

and we are gone down." This left the four ad- 
venturers in a bad pHght, as they had but fifteen 
rounds of powder left, and none of them knew the 
way home. However, there was no help for it, and 
they started off.' When they came to the moun- 
tains they found it such hard going that they were 
obliged to throw away their blankets and every- 
thing else except their rifles, hunting-shirts, leg- 
gings, and moccasins. Like the other parties of 
returning explorers, they found this portion of 
their journey extremely distressing; and they 
suffered much from sore feet, and also from want 
of food, until they came on a gang of buffaloes 
and killed two. At last they struck Cumberland 
Gap, followed a blazed trail across it to Powell's 
Valley, and on August 9th came to the outlying 
settlements on Clinch River, where they found 
the settlers all in their wooden forts, because of 
the war with the Shawnees."* 

In this same year many different bodies of 
hunters and surveyors came into the country, 
drifting down the Ohio in pirogues. Some forty 

' On July 25th. 

' I have j![ivcn the account of Floyd's journej' at some 
length as illustrating the experience of a tj^pical party of sur- 
veyors. The jovimal has never hitherto been alluded to, and 
my getting hold of it was almost accidental. 

There were three different kinds of explorers: Boon repre- 
sents the hunters; the McAfees represent the would-be set- 
tlers; and Floyd's party the svu-veyors who mapped out the 
land for owners of land grants. In 1774, there were parties 



Boon and the Lon<7 Hunters 193 



men, led by Harrod and Sowdowsky ' founded Har- 
rodsburg, where they built cabins and sowed com 
but the Indians killed one of their number and the 
rest dispersed. Some returned across the moun- 
tains ; but Sowdowsky and another went through 
the woods to the Cumberland River, where they 
built a canoe, paddled down the muddy Missis- 
sippi between unending reaches of lonely marsh 
and forest, and from New Orleans took ship to 
Virginia, 

At that time, among other parties of surveyors 
there was one which had been sent by Lord Dun- 
more to the Falls of the Ohio. When the war 
broke out between the Shawnees and the Vir- 
ginians, Lord Dunmore, being very anxious for the 
fate of these surveyors, sent Boon and Stoner to 
pilot them in; which the two bush veterans ac- 
cordingly did, making the round trip of eight 

of each kind in Kentucky. Floyd's experience shows that 
these parties were continually meeting others and splitting 
up; he started out with eight men, at one time was in a body 
with thirty-seven, and returned home with four. 

The journal is written in a singularly clear and legible hand, 
evidently by a man of good education. 

I The latter, from his name presumably of Sclavonic an- 
cestry, came originally from New York, always a centre of 
mixed nationalities. He founded a most respectable family, 
some of whom have changed their name to Sandusky; but 
there seems to be no justification for their claim that they 
gave Sandusky its name, for this is almost certainly a cor- 
ruption of its old Algonquin title. American Pioneer (Cin- 
cinnati, 1843), ii-. P- 325- 



VOL. I. — 13. 



194 The Winning of the West 

hundred miles in sixty-four days. The outbreak 
of the Indian war caused all the hunters and sur- 
veyors to leave Kentucky; and at the end of 1774 
there were no whites left, either there or in what 
is now middle Tennessee. But on the frontier all 
men's eyes were turned towards these new and 
fertile regions. The pioneer work of the hunter 
was over, and that of the axe-bearing settler was 
about to begin. 



\ 



CHAPTER VII 

SEVIER, ROBERTSON, AND THE WATAUGA COM- 
MONWEALTH, 1769-1774 

SOON after the successful ending of the last 
colonial struggle with France, and the con- 
quest of Canada, the British king issued 
a proclamation forbidding the English colonists 
from trespassing on Indian grounds, or moving 
west of the mountains. But in 1 768, at the treaty 
of Fort Stanwix, the Six Nations agreed to sur- 
render to the English all the lands lying between 
the Ohio and the Tennessee ' ; and this treaty was 
at once seized upon by the backwoodsmen as 
offering an excuse for settling beyond the moun- 
tains. However, the Iroquois had ceded lands to 
which they had no more right than a score or more 
other Indian tribes; and these latter, not having 
been consulted, felt at perfect liberty to make war 
on the intruders. In point of fact, no one tribe or 
set of tribes could cede Kentucky or Tennessee, 
because no one tribe or set of tribes owned either. 
The great hunting-grounds between the Ohio and 
the Tennessee formed a debatable land, claimed 

' Then called the Cherokee. 
195 



19^ The Winning of the West 

by every tribe that could hold its own against its 
rivals.' 

The eastern part of what is now Tennessee con- 
sists of a great hill-strewn, forest-clad valley, run- 
ning from northeast to southwest, bounded on one 
side by the Cumberland, and on the other by the 
Great Smoky and Unaka Mountains; the latter 
separating it from North Carolina. In this valley 
arise and end the Clinch, the Holston, the Watauga, 
the Nolichucky, the French Broad, and the other 
streams, whose combined volume makes the Ten- 
nessee River. The upper end of the valley lies in 
southwestern Virginia, the headwaters of some of 
the rivers being well within that State; and 
though the province was really part of North 
Carolina, it was separated therefrom by high 
mountain chains, while from Virginia it was easy 
to follow the watercourses down the valley. Thus, 
as elsewhere among the mountains forming the 
western frontier, the first movements of popula- 
tion went parallel with, rather than across, the 

' Volumes could be filled — and indeed it is hardly too much 
to say, have been filled — with worthless "proofs" of the 
ownership of Iroquois, Shawnees, or Cherokees, as the case 
might be. In truth, it would probably have been difficult to 
get any two members of the same tribe to have pointed out 
with precision the tribal limits. Each tribe's country was 
elastic, for it included all lands from which it was deemed 
possible to drive out the possessors. In 1773, the various 
parties of Long Hunters had just the same right to the whole 
of the territory in question that the Indians themselves had. 



The Watauga Commonwealth 197 

ranges. As in western Virginia the first settlers 
came, for the most part, from Pennsylvania, so, 
in turn, in what was then western North CaroHna, 
and is now eastern Tennessee, the first settlers 
came mainly from Virginia, and, indeed, in great 
part, from this same Pennsylvanian stock.' Of 

^ Campbell MSS. 

"The first settlers on Holston River were a remarkable 
race of people for their intelligence, enterprise, and hardy ad- 
venture. The greater portion of them had emigrated from 
the counties of Botetourt, Augusta, and Frederick, and 
others along the same valley, and from the upper counties of 
Maryland and Pennsylvania; were mostly descendants of 
Irish stock, and generally, where they had any religious 
opinions, were Presbyterians. A very large proportion were 
religious, and many were members of the church. There 
were some families, however, and amongst the most wealthy, 
that were extremely wild and dissipated in their habits. 

"The first clergyman that came among them was the Rev. 
Charles Cvimmings, an Irishman by birth, but educated in 
Pennsylvania. This gentleman was one of the first settlers, 
defended his domicile for years with his rifle in hand, and 
built his first meeting-house on the very spot where he and 
two or three neighbors and one of his servants had had a 
severe skirmish with the Indians, in which one of his party 
was killed and another wounded. Here he preached to a 
very large and most respectable congregation for twenty or 
thirty years. He was a zealous whig, and contributed much 
to kindle the patriotic fire which blazed forth among these 
people in the revolutionary struggle." 

This is from a MS. sketch of the Holston pioneers, by the 
Hon. David Campbell, a son of one of the first settlers. The 
Campbell family, of Presbyterian Irish stock, first came to 
Pennsylvania, and drifted south. In the Revolutionary War 
it produced good soldiers and commanders, such as WilUam 



198 The Winning of the West 

course, in each case there was also a very con- 
siderable movement directly westward.' They 
were a sturdy race, enterprising and intelligent, 
fond of the strong excitement inherent in the ad- 
venturous frontier life. Their untamed and tur- 
bulent passions, and the lawless freedom of their 
lives made them a population very productive of 
wild, headstrong characters ; yet, as a whole, they 
were a God-fearing race, as was but natural in 

and Arthur Campbell. The Campbells intermarried with the 
Prestons, Breckenridges, and other historic families; and 
their blood now runs in the veins of many of the noted men 
of the States south of the Potomac and Ohio. 

' The first settlers on the Watauga included both Virginians 
(as "Captain" William Bean, whose child was the first born 
in what is now Tennessee; Ramsey, 94) and Carolinians 
(Haywood, 37). But many of these Carolina hill people 
were, like Boon and Henderson, members of families who 
had drifted down from the North. The position of the Pres- 
byterian chviTches in all this western hill country shows the 
origin of that portion of the people which gave the tone to 
the rest; and, as we have ahead}' seen, while some of the 
Presbyterians penetrated to the hills from Charleston, most 
came down from the North. The Presbyterian blood was, of 
course, Irish or Scotch; and the numerous English from the 
coast regions also mingled with the two former kindred 
stocks, and adopted their faith. The Huguenots, Hollanders, 
and many of the Germans, being of Calvinistic creed, readily 
assimilated themselves to the Presbyterians. The absence of 
Episcopacy on the western border, while in part indicating 
merely the lack of religion in the backwoods, and the natural 
growth of dissent in such a society, also indicates that the 
people were not of pure English descent, and were of different 
stock from those east of them. 



The Watauga Commonwealth 199 

those who sprang from the loins of the Irish Cal- 
vinists. Their preachers, all Presbyterians, fol- 
lowed close behind the first settlers, and shared 
their toil and dangers ; they tilled their fields rifle 
in hand, and fought the Indians valorously. They 
felt that they were dispossessing the Carfhanites, 
and were thus working the Lord's will in preparing 
the land for a race which they believed was more 
truly His chosen people than was that nation which 
Joshua led across the Jordan. They exhorted no 
less earnestly in the bare meeting-houses on Sun- 
day, because their hands were roughened with 
guiding the plough and wielding the axe on week- 
days; for they did not believe that being called 
to preach the word of God absolved them from 
earning their living by the sweat of their brows. 
The women, the wives of the settlers, were of the 
same iron temper. They fearlessly fronted every 
danger the men did, and they worked quite as 
hard. They prized the knowledge and learning 
they themselves had been forced to do without; 
and many a backwoods woman, by thrift and in- 
dustr}% by the sale of her butter and cheese, and 
the calves from her cows, enabled her husband to 
give his sons good schooHng, and perhaps to pro- 
vide for some favored member of the family the 
opportunity to secure a really first-class educa- 
tion.'' 

^ Campbell MSS. 



200 The Winning of the West 



The valley in which these splendid pioneers of 
our people settled lay directly in the track of the 
Indian marauding parties, for the great war trail 
used by the Cherokees and by their northern foes 
ran along its whole length. This war trail, or war 
trace, a§ it was then called, was in places very dis- 
tinct, although apparently never as well marked 
as were some of the buffalo trails. It sent off a 
branch to Cumberland Gap, whence it ran directly 
north through Kentucky to the Ohio, being there 
known as the warriors' path. Along these trails 
the northern and southern Indians passed and re- 
passed whc^ they went to war against each other ; 
and of course they were ready and eager to attack 
any white man who might settle down along their 
course. 

In 1769, the year that Boon first went to Ken- 
tucky, the first permanent settlers came to the 
banks of the Watauga,^ the settlement being 
merely an enlargement of the Virginia settlement, 
which had for a short time existed on the head- 
waters of the Holston, especially near Wolf Hills.' 

^ For this settlement see especially Civil and Political 
History of the State of Tennessee, John Hayu'ood (Knoxville, 
1823), p. 37; also Annals of Tennessee, J. G. M. Ramsey 
(Charleston, 1853), p. 92; History of Middle Tennessee, A. W. 
Putnam (Nashville, 1 859) , p. 2 1 ; the Address of the Hon. John 
Allison to the Tennessee Press Association (Nashville, 1S87); 
and the History of Tennessee, by James Phelan (Boston, 1888). 

' Now Abingdon. 



The Watauga Commonwealth 201 

At first the settlers thought they were still in the 
domain of Virginia, for at that time the line mark- 
ing her southern boundary had not been run so far 
west.' Indeed, had they not considered the land 
as belonging to Virginia, they would probably not 
at the moment have dared to intrude farther on 
territory claimed by the Indians. But while the 
treaty between the crown and the Iroquois at Fort 
Stanwix ^ had resulted in the cession of whatever 
right the Six Nations had to the southwestern 
territory, another treaty was concluded about the 
same time ^ with the Cherokees, by which the 
latter agreed to surrender their claims to a small 
portion of this country, though as a matter of fact 
before the treaty was signed white settlers had 
crowded beyond the Hmits allowed them. These 
two treaties, in the first of which one set of tribes 
surrendered a small portion of land, while in the 
second an entirely different confederacy surren- 
dered a larger tract, which, however, included part 
of the first cession, are sufficient to show the abso- 
lute confusion of the Indian land titles. 

But in 1 771, one of the new-comers,* who was a 
practical surveyor, ran out the Virginia boundary 

^ It only went to Steep Rock. ^ November 5, 1768. 

3 October 14, 1768, at Hard Labor, S. C, confirmed by the 
treaty of October 18, 1770, at Lockabar, S. C. Both of these 
treaties acknowledged the rights of the Cherokees to the 
major part of these northwestern hunting-groimds. 

4 Anthony Bledsoe. 



202 The Winning of the V/est 

line some distance to the westward, and discovered 
that the Watauga settlement came within the 
limits of North Carolina. Hitherto the settlers 
had supposed that they themselves were governed 
by the Virginian law, and that their rights as 
against the Indians were guaranteed by the Vir- 
ginian government; but this discovery threw 
them back upon their own resources. They sud- 
denly found themselves obliged to organize a civil 
government, under which they themselves should 
live, and at the same time to enter into a treaty 
on their own account with the neighboring In- 
dians, to whom the land they were on apparently 
belonged. 

The first need was even more pressing than the 
second. North Carolina was always a turbulent 
and disorderly colony, unable to enforce law and 
justice even in the long-settled districts ; so that it 
was wholly out of the question to appeal to her for 
aid in governing a remote and outlying community. 
Moreover, about the time that the Watauga com- 
monwealth was founded, the troubles in North 
Carolina came to a head. Open war ensued be- 
tween the adherents of the royal governor, Tryon, 
on the one hand, and the Regulators, as the insur- 
gents styled themselves, on the other, the strug- 
gle ending with the overthrow of the Regulators 
at the battle of the Alamance.* 

' May 1 6, 1771. 



The Watauga Commonwealth 203 

As a consequence of these troubles, many people 
from the back counties of North Carolina crossed 
the mountains, and took up their abode among the 
pioneers on the Watauga ' and upper Holston ; the 
beautiful valley of the Nolichucky soon receiving 
its share of this stream of immigration. Among 
the first comers were many members of the class 
of desperate adventurers always to be found hang- 
ing round the outskirts of frontier civilization. 
Horse-thieves, murderers, escaped bond-servants, 
runaway debtors — all, in fleeing from the law, 
sought to find a secure asylum in the wilderness. 
The brutal and lawless wickedness of these men, 
whose uncouth and raw savagery was almost more 
repulsive than that of city criminals, made it im- 
perative upon the decent members of the commun- 
ity to unite for self -protection. The desperadoes 
were often mere human beasts of prey; they 
plundered whites and Indians impartially. They 
not only by their thefts and murders exasperated 
the Indians into retaliating on innocent whites, 
but, on the other hand, they also often deserted 

^ It is said that the greatest proportion of the early settlers 
came from Wake County, N. C, as did Robertson; but many 
of them, like Robertson, were of Virginian birth; and the 
great majority were of the same stock as the Virginian and 
Pennsylvanian mountaineers. Of the five members of the 
"court" or governing committee of Watauga, three were of 
Virginian birth, one came from South Carolina, and the 
origin of the other is not specified. Ramsey, 107. 



204 The Winning of the West 

their own color and went to live among the red- 
skins, becoming their leaders in the worst out- 
rages.' 

But the bulk of the settlers were men of sterling 
worth, fit to be the pioneer fathers of a mighty 
and beautiful State. They possessed the courage 
that enabled them to defy outside foes, together 
with the rough, practical common sense that al- 
lowed them to establish a simple but effective 
form of government, so as to preserve order among 
themselves. To succeed in the wilderness, it was 
necessary to possess not only daring, but also 
patience and the capacity to endure grinding toil. 
The pioneers were hunters and husbandmen. 
Each, by the aid of axe and brand, cleared his 
patch of com land in the forest, close to some clear, 
swift-flowing stream, and by his skill with the rifle 
won from canebrake and woodland the game on 

^ In Collins, ii., 345, is an account of what may be termed a 
type family of these frontier barbarians. They were named 
Harpe; and there is something revoltingly bestial in the 
record of their crimes; of how they travelled through the 
cotmtry, the elder brother, Micajah Harpe, with two wives, 
the younger with only one; of the appalling nvimber of mur- 
ders they committed, for even small sums of money; of their 
unnatural proposal to kill all their children, so that they 
should not be hampered in their flight; of their life in the 
woods, like wild beasts, and the ignoble ferocity of their ends. 
Scarcely less sombre reading is the account of how they were 
hunted down, and of the wolfish eagerness the borderers 
showed to massacre the women and children as well as the 
men. 



The Watauga Commonwealth 205 



which his family lived until the first crop was 



grown. 



A few more of the reckless and foolhardy, and 
more especially of those who were either merely 
hunters and not farmers, or else who were of 
doubtful character, lived entirely by themselves; 
but, as a rule, each knot of settlers was gathered 
together into a little stockaded hamlet, called a 
fort or station. This system of defensive villages 
was very distinctive of pioneer backwoods life, 
and was unique of its kind ; without it the settle- 
ment of the West and Southwest would have been 
indefinitely postponed. In no other way could 
the settlers have combined for defence, while yet 
retaining their individual ownership of the land. 
The Watauga forts or palisaded villages were of 
the usual kind, the cabins and blockhouses con- 
nected by a heavy loopholed picket. They were 
admirably adapted for defence with the rifle. As 
there was no moat, there was a certain danger 
from an attack with fire unless water was stored 
within ; and it was, of course, necessary to guard 
carefully against surprise. But to open assault 
they were practically impregnable, and they there- 
fore offered a sure haven of refuge to the settlers in 
case of an Indian inroad. In time of peace, the 
inhabitants moved out, to live in their isolated log 
cabins and till the stump-dotted clearings. Trails 
led through the dark forests from one station to 



2o6 . The Winning of the West 

another, as well as to the settled districts beyond 
the mountains; and at long intervals men drove 
along them bands of pack-horses, laden with the 
few indispensable necessaries the settlers could not 
procure by their own labor. The pack-horse was 
the first, and for a long time the only, method of 
carrying on trade in the backwoods ; and the busi- 
ness of the packer was one of the leading frontier 
industries. 

The settlers worked hard and hunted hard, and 
lived both plainly and roughly. Their cabins 
were roofed with clapboards, or huge shingles, 
split from the log with maul and wedge, and held 
in place by heavy stones, or by poles ; the floors 
were made of rived puncheons, hewn smooth on 
one surface; the chimney was outside the hut, 
made of rock when possible, otherwise of logs 
thickly plastered with clay that was strengthened 
with hogs' bristles or deer hair; in the great fire- 
place was a tongue on which to hang pot-hooks 
and kettle; the unglazed window had a wooden 
shutter, and the door was made of great clap- 
boards.' The men made their own harness, 
farming implements, and domestic utensils; and, 
as in every other community still living in the 
heroic age, the smith was a person of the utmost 
importance. There was but one thing that all 

" In American Pioneers, ii., 445, is a fuU description of the 
better sort of backwoods log cabin. 



The Watauga Commonwealth 20^ 

could have in any quantity, and that was land; 
each had all of this he wanted for the taking, — or 
if it was known to belong to the Indians, he got its 
use for a few trinkets or a flask of whisky. A few 
of the settlers still kept some of the Presbyterian 
austerity of character, as regards amusements; 
but, as a rule, they were fond of horse-racing, 
drinking, dancing, and fiddling. The corn-shuck- 
ings, flax-pullings, log-rollings (when the felled 
timber was rolled off the clearings), house- 
raisings, maple-sugar boilings, and the like were 
scenes of boisterous and light-hearted merriment, 
to which the whole neighborhood came, for it was 
accounted an insult if a man was not asked in to 
help on such occasions, and none but a base churl 
would refuse his assistance. The backwoods peo- 
ple had to front peril and hardship without stint, 
and they loved for the moment to leap out of the 
bounds of their narrow lives and taste the coarse 
pleasures that are always dear to a strong, simple, 
and primitive race. Yet underneath their moodi- 
ness and their fitful light-heartedness lay a spirit 
that when roused was terrible in its ruthless and 
stem intensity of purpose 

Such were the settlers of the Watauga, the 
founders of the commonwealth that grew into the 
State of Tennessee, who early in 1772 decided that 
they must form some kind of government that 
would put down wrong-doing and work equity 



2o8 The Winning of the West 

between man and man. Two of their number 
already towered head and shoulders above the 
rest in importance, and merit especial mention ; for 
they were destined for the next thirty years to play 
the chief parts in the history of that portion of the 
Southwest which largely through their own efforts 
became the State of Tennessee. These two men, 
neither of them yet thirty years of age, were John 
Sevier and James Robertson.' 

Robertson first came to the Watauga early in 
1770.=" He had then been married for two years, 
and had been "learning his letters and to spell" 
from his well-educated wife ; for he belonged to a 
backwoods family, even poorer than the average, 
and he had not so much as received the rudimen- 
tary education that could be acquired at an "old- 
field" school. But he was a man of remarkable 
natural powers, above the medium height, with 

^ Both were born in Virginia: Sevier in Rockingham 
County, September 23, 1745, and Robertson in Brunswick 
County, June 28, 1742. 

^ Putnam, p. 2 1 ; who, however, is evidently in error in 
thinking he was accompanied by Boon, as the latter was 
then in Kentucky. A recent writer revives this error in 
another form, stating that Robertson accompanied Boon to 
the Watauga in 1769. Boon, however, left on his travels 
on May i, 1769, and in June was in Kentucky; whereas 
Putnam not only informs us definitely that Robertson went 
to the Watauga for the first time in 1770, but also mentions 
that when he went his eldest son was already born, and this 
event took place in June, 1769, so that it is certain Boon and 
Robertson were not together. 



The Watauga Commonwealth 209 

wiry, robust form, light-blue eyes, fair complex- 
ion, and dark hair ; his somewhat sombre face had 
in it a look of self-contained strength that made 
it impressive'; and his taciturn, quiet, masterful 
way of dealing with men and affairs, together with 
his singular mixture of cool caution and most 
adventurous daring, gave him an immediate hold 
even upon such lawless spirits as those of the 
border. He was a mighty hunter; but, unlike 
Boon, hunting and exploration were to him sec- 
ondary affairs, and he came to examine the lands 
with the eye of a pioneer settler. He intended to 
have a home where he could bring up his family, 
and, if possible, he wished to find rich lands, with 
good springs, whereto he might lead those of 
his neighbors who, like himself, eagerly desired to 
rise in the world, and to provide for the well- 
being of their children. 

To find such a country, Robertson, then dwell- 
ing in North Carolina, decided to go across the 
mountains. He started off alone on his exploring 
expedition, rifle in hand, and a good horse under 
him. He crossed the ranges that continue north- 
ward the Great Smokies, and spent the summer in 
the beautiful hill country where the springs of the 
western waters flowed from the ground. He had 

^ The description of his looks is taken from the statements 
of his descendants, and of the grandchildren of his contem- 
poraries. 

VOL. I.— 14. 



2IO The Winning of the West 

■never seen so lovely a land. The high valleys, 
through which the currents ran, were hemmed in 
by towering mountain walls, with cloud-capped 
peaks. The fertile loam forming the bottoms was 
densely covered with the growth of the primeval 
forest, broken here and there by glade-like open- 
ings, where herds of game grazed on the tall, thick 
grass. 

Robertson was well treated by the few settlers, 
and stayed long enough to raise a crop of corn, 
the stand-by of the backwoods pioneer ; like every 
other hunter, explorer, Indian fighter, and wilder- 
ness wanderer, he lived on the game he shot, and 
the small quantity of maize he was able to carry 
with him.' In the late fall, however, when re- 
crossing the mountain on his way home through 
the trackless forests, both game and com failed 
him. He lost his way, was forced to abandon his 
horse among impassable precipices, and finally 
found his rifle useless, owing to the powder having 
become soaked. For fourteen days he lived 
almost wholly on nuts and wild berries, and was 
on the point of death from starvation when he 
met two hunters on horseback, who fed him and 
let him ride their horses by turns, and brought 
him safely to his home. 

' The importance of " maize " to the western settler is 
shown by the fact that in our tongue it has now monopolized 
the title of " com." 



The Watauga Commonwealth 211 

Such hardships were Httle more than matter-of- 
course incidents in a Hfe Hke his ; and he at once 
prepared to set out with his family for the new 
land. His accounts greatly excited his neighbors, 
and sixteen families made ready to accompany 
him. The little caravan started, under Robert- 
son's guidance, as soon as the ground had dried 
after the winter rains in the spring of 1 7 7 1 . ' They 
travelled in the usual style of backwoods emi- 
grants; the men on foot, rifle on shoulder, the 
elder children driving the lean cows, while the 
women, the young children, and the few house- 
hold goods and implements of husbandry were 
carried on the backs of the pack-horses; for in 
settHng the backwoods during the last centur>% 
the pack-horse played the same part that in the 
present century was taken by the canvas-covered 
emigrant wagon, the white-topped "prairie 
schooner." 

Once arrived at the Watauga, the Carolina new- 
comers mixed readily with the few Virginians 
already on the ground; and Robertson speedily 
became one of the leading men in the little settle- 
ment. On an island in the river he built a house 
of logs with the bark still on them on the outside, 
though hewed smooth within ; tradition says that 

^ Putnam, p. 24, says it was after the battle of the Great 
Alamance, which took place May 16, 1771. An untrust- 
worthy tradition says March. 



2 12 



/ 



The Winning of the West 



it was the largest in the settlement. Certainly it 
belonged to the better class of backwoods cabins, 
with a loft and several rooms, a roof of split sap- 
lings, held down by weighty poles, a log veranda 
in front, and a huge fireplace of sticks and stones 
laid in clay, wherein the pile of blazing logs roared 
loudly in cool weather. The furniture was prob- 
ably precisely like that in other houses of the 
class*^, a rude bed, table, settee, and chest of 
drawers, a spinning-jenny, and either three-legged 
stools or else chairs with backs and seats of un- 
dressed deer-hides. Robertson's energy and his 
remarkable natural ability brought him to the 
front at once, in every way ; although, as already 
said, he had much less than even the average 
backwoods education, for he could not read when 
he was married, while most of the frontiersmen 
could not only read but also write, or at least sign 
their names.' 

Sevier, who came to the Watauga early in 1772, 
nearly a year after Robertson and his little colony 
had arrived, differed widely from his friend in 
almost every respect save highmindedness and 
dauntless, invincible courage. He was a gentle- 
man by birth and breeding, the son of a Huguenot 

' In examining numerous original drafts of petitions and 
the like, signed by hundreds of the original settlers of Tennes- 
see and Kentucky, I have been struck by the small proportion 
— not much over three or ionr per cent, at the outside — of 
men who made their mark instead of signing. 



^ 



The Watauga Commonwealth 213 

who had settled in the Shenandoah valley. He 
had received a fair education, and though never 
fond of books, he was to the end of his days an 
interested and intelligent observer of men and 
things, both in i\merica and Europe. He corre- 
sponded on intimate and equal terms with Madi- 
son, Franklin, and others of our most polished 
statesmen ; while Robertson's letters, when he had 
finally learned to write them himself, were almost 
as remarkable for their phenomenally bad spell- 
ing as for their shrewd common sense and homely, 
straightforward honesty. Sevier fvas a very 
handsome man; during his lifetime he was re- 
puted the handsomest in Tennessee. He was 
tall, fair-skinned, blue-eyed, brown-haired, of 
slender build, with erect, military carriage and 
commanding bearing, his lithe, finely propor- 
tioned figure being well set off by the hunting- 
shirt which he almost invariably wore. From his 
French forefathers he inherited a gay, pleasure- 
loving temperament, that made him the most 
charming of companions. His manners were 
poHshed and easy, and he had great natural dig- 
nity. Over the backwoodsmen he exercised an 
almost unbounded influence, due as much to his 
ready tact, invariable courtesy, and lavish, gen- 
erous hospitality as to the skill and dashing prow- 
ess which made him the most renowned Indian 
fighter of the Southwest. He had an eager, 



214 The Winning of the West 

impetuous nature, and was very ambitious, being 
almost as fond of popularity as of Indian-fighting.' 
He was already married and the father of two 
children when he came to the Watauga, and, like 
Robertson, was seeking a new and better home 
for his family in the West. So far, his life had 
been as uneventful as that of any other spirited 
young borderer; his business had been that of a 
frontier Indian trader; he had taken part in one 
or two unimportant Indian skirmishes.^ Later, 

^ See, in the collection of the Tennessee Historical Society 
at Nashville, the MS. notes containing an account of Sevier, 
given by one of the old settlers, named Hillsman. Hillsman 
especially dwells on the skill with which Sevier could persuade 
the backwoodsmen to come round to his own way of thinking, 
while at the same time making them believe that they were 
acting on their own ideas, and adds: "whatever he had was 
at the service of his friends and for the promotion of the 
Sevier party, which sometimes embraced nearly all the popu- 
lation." 

" Mr. James Gilmore (Edmtmd Kirke), in his yohn Sevier, 
makes some assertions, totally unbacked by proof, about his 
hero's alleged feats, when only a boy, in the wars between the 
Virginians and the Indians. He gives no dates, but can 
only refer to Pontiac's war. Sevier was then eighteen j^ears 
old, but nevertheless is portrayed, among other things, as 
leading "a hundred hardy borderers" into the Indian coun- 
try, burning their villages and "often defeating bodies of five 
times his own numbers." These stateinents are supported 
by no better authority than traditions gathered a century 
and a quarter after the event, and must be dismissed as 
mere fable. They show a total and rather amusing ignorance 
not only of the conditions of Indian warfare, but also of the 
history of the particular contest referred to. Mr. Gilmore 



The Watauga Commonwealth 215 

he was commissioned by Lord Dunmore as a cap- 
tain in the Virginia line. 

Such were Sevier and Robertson, the leaders in 
the little frontier outpost of civilization that was 
struggling to maintain itself on the Watauga ; and 
these two men afterwards proved themselves to 
be, with the exception of George Rogers Clark, 
the greatest of the first generation of Trans- Alle- 
ghany pioneers. 

Their followers were worthy of them. All alike 
were keenly alive to the disadvantages of living 
in a community where there was neither law nor 
officer to enforce it. Accordingly, with their 

forgets that we have numerous histories of the war in which 
Sevier is supposed to have distinguished himself, and that in 
not one of them is there a syllable hinting at what he says. 
Neither Sevier nor any one else ever with a hundred men de- 
feated "five times his number" of northwestern Indians in 
the woods; and, dtuing Sevier's Hfe in Virginia, the only 
defeat ever suffered by such a body of Indians was at Bushy 
Run, when Bouquet gained a hard-fought victory. After 
the end of Pontiac's war there was no expedition of impor- 
tance undertaken byVirginians against the Indians until 1774. 
and of Pontiac's war itself we have full knowledge. Sevier 
was neither leader nor participant in any such marvellous 
feats as Mr. Gilmore describes; on the contrary, the skir- 
mishes in which he may have been engaged were of such small 
importance that no record remains concerning them. Had 
Sevier done any such deeds all the colonies would have rung 
with his exploits, instead of their remaining utterly unknown 
for a hundred and twenty-five years. It is extraordinary 
that any author should be willing to put his name to such 
reckless misstatements, in what purports to be a history and 
not a book of fiction. 



2i6 The Winning of the West 

characteristic capacity for combination, so strik- 
ing as existing together with the equally character- 
istic capacity for individual self-help, the settlers 
determined to organize a government of their own. 
They promptly put their resolution into effect 
early in the spring of 1772, Robertson being appa- 
rently the leader in the movement. 

They decided to adopt written articles of agree- 
ment, by which their conduct should be gov- 
erned; and these were known as the Articles of 
the Watauga Association. They formed a writ- 
ten constitution, the first ever adopted west of 
the mountains, or by a community composed of 
American-born freemen. It is this fact of the 
early independence and self-government of the 
settlers along the headwaters of the Tennessee 
that gives to their history its peculiar importance. 
They were the first men of American birth to 
establish a free and independent community on 
the continent. Even before this date, there had 
been straggling settlements of Pennsylvanians and 
Virginians along the headwaters of the Ohio ; but 
these settlements remained mere parts of the col- 
onies behind them, and neither grew into a sep- 
arate community, nor played a distinctive part in 
the growth of the West. 

The first step taken by the Watauga settlers,^ 

' The Watauga settlers and those of Carter's Valley were 
the first to organize; the Nolichucky people came in later. 



The Watauga Commonwealth 217 

when they had determined to organize, was to 
meet in general convention, holding a kind of 
folk-thing, akin to the New England town-meet- 
ing. They then elected a representative assem- 
bly, a small parliament or " witanagemot," which 
met at Robertson's station. Apparently the free- 
men of each little fort or palisaded village, each 
blockhouse that was the centre of a group of de- 
tached cabins and clearings, sent a member to 
this first frontier legislature.^ It consisted of 
thirteen representatives, who proceeded to elect 
from their number five — among them Sevier and 
Robertson — to form a committee or court, which 
should carry on the actual business of govern- 
ment, and should exercise both judicial and execu- 
tive functions. This court had a clerk and a 
sheriff, or executive officer, who respectively re- 
corded and enforced their decrees. 

The five members of this court, who are some- 
times referred to as arbitrators and sometimes as 
commissioners, had entire control of all matters 
affecting the common weal; and all affairs in 
controversy were settled by the decision of a 
majority. They elected one of their number as 
chairman, he being also ex-officio chairman of the 
committee of thirteen ; and all their proceedings 
were noted for the prudence and moderation with 
which they behaved in their somewhat anomalous 

^ Putnam, 30. 



2i8 The Winning of the West 

position. They were careful to avoid embroiling 
themselves with the neighboring colonial legisla- 
tures; and in dealing with non-residents they 
made them give bonds to abide by their decision, 
thus avoiding any necessity of proceeding against 
their persons. On behalf of the community itself, 
they were not only permitted to control its inter- 
nal affairs, but also to secure lands by making 
treaties with a foreign power, the Indians — a dis- 
tinct exercise of the right of sovereignty. They 
heard and adjudicated all cases of difference be- 
tween the settlers themselves ; and took measures 
for the common safety. In fact, the dwellers, in 
this little outlying frontier commonwealth, exer- 
cised the rights of full statehood for a number of 
years; establishing in true American style a 
purely democratic government with representa- 
tive institutions, in which, under certain restric- 
tions, the will of the majority was supreme, while, 
nevertheless, the largest individual freedom and 
the utmost liberty of individual initiative were 
retained. The framers showed the American pre- 
dilection for a written constitution or civil com- 
pact ' ; and, what was more important, they also 

' The original articles of the Watauga Association have 
been lost, and no copies are extant. All we know of the 
matter is derived from Ha5'^vood, Ramsey, and Putnam, 
three historians to whose prai.seworthy industry Tennessee 
owes as much as Kentucky does to Marshall, Butler, and 
Collins. Ramsey, by the way, chooses rather inappropriate 



The Watauga Commonwealth 219 

showed the common-sense American spirit that 
led them to adopt the scheme of government 
which should in the simplest way best serve their 
need, without bothering their heads over mere 
high-sounding abstractions. 

The court or committee held their sessions at 
stated and regular times, and took the law of Vir- 
ginia as their standard for decisions. They saw 
to the recording of deeds and wills, settled all 
questions of debt, issued marriage licenses, and 
carried on a most vigorous warfare against law- 
breakers, especially horse-thieves.' For six years 
their government continued in full vigor; then, 
in February, 1778, North Carolina having organ- 
ized Washington County, which included all of 
what is now Tennessee, the governor of that 
State appointed justices of the peace and militia 
officers for the new county, and the old system 
came to an end. But Sevier, Robertson, and their 
fellow-committeemen were all members of the new 
court, and continued almost without change their 
former simple system of procedure and direct and 
expeditious methods of administering justice; as 
justices of the peace they merely continued to act 
as they acted while arbitrators of the Watauga 

adjectives when he calls the government "paternal and 
patriarchal." 

' A very good account of this government is given in 
Allison's Address, pp. 5-8, and from it the examples in the 
text are taken. 



220 The Winninsf of the West 



fe 



Association, and in their summary mode of deal- 
ing with evil-doers paid a good deal more heed to 
the essence than to the forms of law. One record 
shows that a horse-thief was arrested on Monday, 
tried on Wednesday, and hung on Friday of the 
same week. Another deals with a claimant who, 
by his attorney, moved to be sworn into his office 
of clerk, "but the court swore in James Sevier, 
well knowing that said Sevier had been elected," 
and being evidently unwilling to waste their time 
hearing a contested election case when their minds 
w^ere already made up as to the equity of the 
matter. They exercised the right of making sus- 
picious individuals leave the county.' They also 
at times became censors of morals, and interfered 
with straightforward effectiveness to right wrongs 
for which a more refined and elaborate system of 
jurisprudence would have provided only cumber- 
some and inadequate remedies. Thus one of their 
entries is to the effect that a certain man is or- 
dered "to return to his family and demean him- 
self as a good citizen, he having admitted in open 
court that he had left his wife and took up with 
another woman." From the character of the 
judges who made the decision, it is safe to pre- 

^ A right the exercise of which is of course susceptible to 
great abuse, but, nevertheless, is often absolutely necessary 
to the well-being of a frontier community. In almost every 
case where I have personally known it exercised, the character 
of the individual ordered off justified the act. 



The Watauga Commonwealth 221 

sume that the dehnquent either obeyed it or else 
promptly fled to the Indians for safety.' This 
fleeing to the Indians, by the way, was a feat often 
performed by the worst criminals — for the rene- 
gade, the man who had "painted his face" and 
deserted those of his own color, was a being as well 
known as he was abhorred and despised on the 
border, where such a deed was held to be the one 
unpardonable crime. 

So much for the way in which the whites kept 
order among themselves. The second part of 
their task, the adjustment of their relations with 
their red neighbors, was scarcely less important. 
Early in 1772, Virginia made a treaty with the 
Cherokee nation which established as the bound- 
ary between them a line running west from White 
Top Mountain in latitude 36° 30'.=" Immediately 
afterwards the agent 3 of the British Government 
among the Cherokees ordered the Watauga set- 
tlers to instantly leave their lands. They defied 
him, and refused to move; but feeling the inse- 
curity of their tenure they deputed two commis- 
sioners, of whom Robertson was one, to make a 
treaty with the Cherokees. This was successfully 
accomplished, the Indians leasing to the associated 
settlers all the lands on the Watauga waters for 

' Allison's Address. 

' Ramsey, 109. Putnam says 36° 35'. 

3 Alexander Cameron. 



222 The Winning of the West 

the space of eight years, in consideration of about 
six thousand dollars' worth of blankets, paint, 
muskets, and the like.' The amount advanced 
was reimbursed to the men advancing it by the 
sale of the lands in small parcels to new settlers, "^ 
for the time of the lease. 3 

After the lease was signed, a day was appointed 
on which to hold a great race, as well as wrestling- 
matches and other sports, at Watauga. Not only 
many whites from the various settlements, but 
also a number of Indians, came to see or take part 
in the sports ; and all went well until the evening, 
when some lawless men from Wolf Hills, who had 
been lurking in the woods round about,-* killed an 
Indian, whereat his fellows left the spot in great 
anger. 

' Haywood, 43. 

^ Meanwhile Carter's Valley, then believed to lie in Vir- 
ginia, had been settled by Virginians; the Indians robbed a 
trader's store, and indemnified the owners by giving them 
land, at the treaty of Sycamore Shoals. This land was leased 
in job lots to settlers, who, however, kept possession without 
paying when they found it lay in North Carolina. 

3 A similar but separate lease was made by the settlers on 
the Nolichucky, who acquired a beautiful and fertile valley 
in exchange for the merchandise carried on the back of a 
single pack-horse. Among the whites themselves transfers 
of land were made in very simple forms and conveyed not 
the fee simple but merely the grantor's claim. 

4 Haywood says they were named Crabtrce ; Putnam hints 
that they had lost a brother when Boon's party was attacked 
and his son killed; but the attack on Boon did not take place 
till over a year after this time. 



The Watauga Commonwealth 223 

The settlers now saw themselves threatened with 
a bloody and vindictive Indian war, and were 
plunged in terror and despair ; yet they were res- 
cued by the address and daring of Robertson. 
Leaving the others to build a formidable palisaded 
fort, under the leadership of Sevier, Robertson set 
off alone through the woods and followed the 
great war trace down to the Cherokee towns. His 
mission was one of the greatest peril, for there was 
imminent danger that the justly angered savages 
would take his life. But he was a man who never 
rushed heedlessly into purposeless peril, and never 
flinched from a danger which there was an object 
in encountering. His quiet, resolute fearlessness 
doubtless impressed the savages to whom he went, 
and helped to save his life ; moreover, the Chero- 
kees knew him, trusted his word, and were prob- 
ably a little overawed by a certain air of command 
to which all men that were thrown in contact with 
him bore witness. His ready tact and know- 
ledge of Indian character did the rest. He per- 
suaded the chiefs and warriors to meet him in 
council, assured them of the anger and sorrow 
with which all the Watauga people viewed the 
murder, which had undoubtedly been committed 
by some outsider, and wound up by declaring his 
determination to try to have the wrong-doer 
arrested and punished according to his crime. 
The Indians, already pleased with his embassy, 



224 The Winning of the West 

finally consented to pass the affair over and not 
take vengeance upon innocent men. Then the 
daring backwoods diplomatist, well pleased with 
the success of his mission, returned to the anxious 
little community. 

The incident, taken in connection with the 
plundering of a store kept by two whites in Hol- 
ston Valley at the same time, and the unprovoked 
assault on Boon's party in Powell's Valley a year 
later, shows the extreme difficulty of preventing 
the worst men of each color from wantonly attack- 
ing the innocent. There was hardly a peaceable 
red or law-abiding white who could not recite 
injuries he had received from members of the 
opposite race ; and his sense of the wrongs he had 
suffered, as well as the general frontier indiffer- 
ence to crimes committed against others, made 
him slow in punishing similar outrages by his own 
people. The Watauga settlers discountenanced 
wrong being done the Indians, and tried to atone 
for it, but they never hunted the offenders down 
with the necessary mercilessness that alone could 
have prevented a repetition of their offences. Sim- 
ilarly, but to an even greater degree, the good 
Indians shielded the bad.' 

' Even La Rochefoucauld- Liancourt (8, 95), who loathed 
the backwoodsmen, — few polished Europeans being able to 
see any but the repulsive side of frontier character, a side 
certainly very often prominent, — also speaks of the tendency 
of the worst Indians to go to the frontier to rob and murder. 



The Watauga Commonwealth 225 

For several years after they made their lease 
with the Cherokees the men of the Watauga were 
not troubled by their Indian neighbors. They 
had to fear nothing more than a drought, a freshet, 
a forest fire, or an unusually deep snow-fall if 
hunting on the mountains in mid-winter. They 
lived in peace, hunting and farming, marrying, 
giving in marriage, and rearing many healthy 
children. By degrees they wrought out of the 
stubborn wilderness comfortable homes, filled with 
plenty. The stumps were drawn out of the clear- 
ings, and other grains were sown besides com. 
Beef, pork, and mutton were sometimes placed on 
the table, besides the more common venison, bear 
meat, and wild turkey. The women wove good 
clothing, the men procured good food, the log 
cabins, if homely and rough, yet gave ample 
warmth and shelter. The families throve, and 
life was happy, even though varied with toil, 
danger, and hardship. Books were few, and it 
was some years before the first church — Presby- 
terian, of course — was started in the region.* 
The backwoods Presbyterians managed their 
church affairs much as they did their civil govern- 
ment: each congregation appointed a committee 

* Salem Church was founded (Allison, 8) in 1777, by 
Samuel Doak, a Princeton graduate, and a man of sound 
learning, who also at the same time started Washington 
College, the first real institution of learning south of the 
Alleghanies. 

VOL. I. — 15. • 



226 The Winnino- of the West 



^3 



to choose ground, to build a meeting-house, to col- 
lect the minister's salary, and to pay all charges, 
by taxing the members proportionately for the 
same, the committee being required to turn in a 
full account and receive instructions at a general 
session or meeting held twice every year.^ 

Thus the Watauga folk were the first Ameri- 
cans who, as a separate body, moved into the wil- 
derness to hew out dwellings for themselves and 
their children, trusting only to their own shrewd 
heads, stout hearts, and strong arms, unhelped 
and unhampered by the power nominally their 
sovereign.^ They built up a commonwealth which 
had many successors ; they showed that the fron- 
tiersmen could do their work unassisted ; for they 
not only proved that they were made of stuff 
stem enough to hold its own against outside pres- 
sure of any sort, but they also made it evident 
that having won the land they were competent to 
govern both it and themselves. They were the 
first to do what the whole nation has since done. 
It has often been said that we owe all our success 
to our surroundings ; that any race with our op- 
portunities could have done as well as we have 
done. Undoubtedly our opportunities have been 
great ; undoubtedly we have often and lamentably 
failed in taking advantage of them. But what 
nation ever has done all that was possible with the 

' Annals of Augusta, 21. ^ See Appendix. 



The Watauoa Commonwealth 227 



*£5 



chances offered it? The Spaniards, the Portu- 
guese, and the French, not to speak of the Rus- 
sians in Siberia, have all enjoyed, and yet have 
failed to make good use of, the same advantages 
which we have turned to good account. The 
truth is, that in starting a new nation in a new 
country, as we have done, while there are excep- 
tional chances to be taken advantage of, there are 
also exceptional dangers and difficulties to be 
overcome. None but heroes can succeed wholly 
in the work. It is a good thing for us at times to 
compare what we have done with what we could 
have done had we been better and wiser ; it may 
make us try in the future to raise our abilities to 
the level of our opportunities. Looked at abso- 
lutely, we must frankly acknowledge that we have 
fallen very far short indeed of the high ideal we 
should have reached. Looked at relatively, it 
must also be said that we have done better than 
any other nation or race working under our 
conditions. 

The Watauga settlers outlined in advance the 
nation's work. They tamed the rugged and 
shaggy wilderness, they bid defiance to outside 
foes, and they successfully solved the difficult 
problem of self-government. 



CHAPTER VIII 

LORD DUNMORE'S WAR, 1 774 

ON the eve of the Revolution, in 1774, 
the frontiersmen had planted themselves 
firmly among the Alleghanies. Directly- 
west of them lay the untenanted wilderness, tra- 
versed only by the war parties of the red men 
and the hunting parties of both reds and whites. 
No settlers had yet penetrated it, and until they 
did so there could be within its borders no chance 
of race warfare, unless we call by that name the 
unchronicled and unending contest in which, now 
and then, some solitary white woodsman slew, or 
was slain by, his painted foe. But in the South- 
west and the Northwest alike, the area of settle- 
ment already touched the home lands of the tribes, 
and hence the horizon was never quite free from 
the cloud of threatening Indian war; yet for the 
moment the Southwest was at peace, for the 
Cherokees were still friendly. 

It was in the Northwest that the danger of col- 
lision was most imminent; for there the whites 
and Indians had wronged one another for a gen- 
eration, and their interests were, at the time, clash- 

228 



Lord Dunmore's War 229 

ing more directly than ever. Much the greater 
part of the western frontier was held or claimed 
by Virginia, whose royal governor was, at the time, 
Lord Dunmore. He was an ambitious, energetic 
man, who held his allegiance as being due first to 
the crown, but who, nevertheless, was always eager 
to champion the cause of Virginia as against either 
the Indians or her sister colonies. The short but 
fierce and eventful struggle that now broke out 
was fought wholly by Virginians, and was gener- 
ally known by the name of Lord Dunmore's war. 
Virginia, under her charter, claimed that her 
boundaries ran across to the South Seas, to the 
Pacific Ocean. The king of Britain had graciously 
granted her the right to take so much of the con- 
tinent as lay within these lines, provided she 
could win it from the Indians, French, and Span- 
iards; and provided also she could prevent her- 
self from being ousted by the crown, or by some 
of the other colonies. A number of grants had 
been made with the like large liberality, and it 
was found that they sometimes conflicted with 
one another. The consequence was that while 
the boundaries were well marked near the coast, 
where they separated Virginia from the long- 
settled regions of Maryland and North CaroHna, 
they became exceeding vague and indefinite the 
moment they touched the mountains. Even at 
the South this produced confusion, and induced 



230 The Winninor of the West 



the settlers of the upper Holston to consider them- 
selves as Virginians, not Carolinians; but at the 
North the effect was still more confusing, and 
nearly resulted in bringing about an intercolonial 
war between Pennsylvania and Virginia. 

The Virginians claimed all of extreme western 
Pennsylvania, especially Fort Pitt and the valley 
of the Monongahela, and, in 1774, proceeded 
boldly to exercise jurisdiction therein.' Indeed, 
a strong party among the settlers favored the Vir- 
ginian claim; whereas it would have been quite 
impossible to arouse anywhere in Virginia the 
least feeling in support of a similar claim on be- 
half of Pennsylvania. The borderers had a great 
contempt for the sluggish and timid government 
of the Quaker province, which was very lukewarm 
in protecting them in their rights — or, indeed, in 
punishing them when they did wrong to others. 
In fact, it seems probable that they would have 
declared for Virginia even more strongly, had it 
not been for the very reason that their feeling of 
independence was so surly as to make them sus- 
picious of all forms of control ; and they therefore 
objected almost as much to Virginian, as Pennsyl- 
vanian rule, and regarded the outcome of the dis- 
pute with a certain indifference.* 

' American Archives, 4th Series, vol. i., p. 454. Report of 
Pennsylvania Commissioners, June 27, 1774. 

' Maryland was also involved, along her western frontier, 
in border difficulties with her neighbors; the first we hear 



Lord Dunmore's War 231 

For a time in the early part of 1774 there 
seemed quite as much HkeHhood of the Vir- 
ginians being drawn into a fight with the Penn- 
sylvanians as with the Shawnees. While the 
Pennsylvanian commissioners were trying to come 
to an agreement concerning the boundaries with 
Lord Dunmore, the representatives of the two 
contesting parties at Fort Pitt were on the verge 
of actual collision. The Earl's agent in the dis- 
puted territory was a Captain John Conolly,' a 
man of violent temper and bad character. He 
embodied the men favorable to his side as a sort 
of Virginian militia, with which he not only men- 
aced both hostile and friendly Indians, but the 
adherents of the Pennsylvanian government as 
well. He destroyed their houses, killed their 
cattle and hogs, impressed their horses, and fin- 
ally so angered them that they threatened to take 
refuge in the stockade at Fort Pitt and defy him 
to open war, — although even in the midst of these 
quarrels with Conolly their loyalty to the Quaker 
State was somewhat doubtful. - 

The Virginians were the only foes the western 

of the Cresap family is their having engaged in a real skirmish 
with the Pennsylvanian authorities. See also American 
Archives, 4th Series, vol. i., 547. 

^ American Archives, 4th Series, vol. i., 394, 449, 469, etc. 
He was generally called Dr. Conolly. 

2 See ibid., 463, 471, etc., especially St. Clair's letters, 
passim. 



232 The Winning of the West 

Indians really dreaded; for their backwoodsmen 
were of warlike temper, and had learned to fight 
effectively in the forest. The Indians styled them 
Long Knives; or, to be more exact, they called 
them collectively the " Big Knife." ^ There have 
been many accounts given of the origin of this 
name, some ascribing it to the long knives worn 
by the hunters and backwoodsmen generally, 
others to the fact that some of the noted Virgin- 
ian fighters in their early skirmishes were armed 
with swords. At any rate, the title was accepted 
by all the Indians as applying to their most deter- 
mined foes among the colonists ; and, finally, after 
we had become a nation, was extended so as to 
apply to Americans generally. 

The war that now ensued was not general. The 
Six Nations, as a whole, took no part in it, while 
Pennsylvania also stood aloof; indeed, at one 
time it was proposed that the Pennsylvanians and 
Iroquois should jointly endeavor to mediate be- 
tween the combatants." The struggle was purely 
between the Virginians and the northwestern 
Indians. 

The interests of the Virginians and Pennsyl- 
vanians conflicted not only in respect to the owner- 

^ In most of the original treaties, "talks," etc., preserved in 
the Archives of the State Department where the translation 
is exact, the word " Big Knife " is used. 

2 Letter of John Penn, June 28, 1774. American Archives, 
4th Series, vol. v. 



Lord Dunmore's War 233 

ship of the land, but also in respect to the policy 
to be pursued regarding the Indians. The former 
were armed colonists, whose interest it was to get 
actual possession of the soil ' ; whereas in Penn- 
sylvania the Indian trade was very important and 
lucrative, and the numerous traders to the Indian 
towns were anxious that the redskins should re- 
main in undisturbed enjoyment of their forests, 
and that no white man should be allowed to come 
among them ; moreover, so long as they were able 
to make heavy profits they were utterly indiffer- 
ent to the well-being of the white frontiersmen, 
and in return incurred the suspicion and hatred 
of the latter. The Virginians accused the traders 
of being the main cause of the difficulty,^ assert- 
ing that they sometimes incited the Indians to 
outrages, and always, even in the midst of hos- 
tilities, kept them supplied with guns and ammu- 
nition, and even bought from them the horses that 
they had stolen on their plundering expeditions 
against the Virginian border.^ These last accusa- 
tions were undoubtedly justified, at least in great 
part, by the facts. The interests of the white 
trader from Pennsylvania and of the white settler 
from Virginia were so far from being identical that 
they were usually diametrically opposite. 

The northwestern Indians had been nominally 
at peace with the whites for ten years, since the 

^ Ibid., 46$. '^ Ibid., 722. 3 ibid., 872. 



234 The Winnino^ of the West 



close of Bouquet's campaign. But Bouquet had 
inflicted a very slight punishment upon them, and 
in concluding an unsatisfactory peace had caused 
them to make but a partial reparation for the 
wrongs they had done/ They remained haughty 
and insolent, irritated rather than awed by an 
ineffective chastisement, and their young men 
made frequent forays on the frontier. Each of 
the ten years of nominal peace saw plenty of blood- 
shed. Recently they had been seriously alarmed 
by the tendency of the whites to encroach on the 
great hunting-grounds south of the Ohio ^ ; for 
here and there hunters or settlers were already 
beginning to build cabins along the course of that 
stream. The cession by the Iroquois of these 
same hunting-grounds, at the treaty of Fort Stan- 
wix, while it gave the whites a colorable title, 
merely angered the northwestern Indians. Half 
a century earlier they would hardly have dared 
dispute the power of the Six Nations to do what 
they chose with any land that could be reached 
by their war parties; but in 1774 they felt quite 
able to hold their own against their old oppressors, 
and had no intention of acquiescing in any arrange- 
ment the latter might make, unless it was also 
clearly to their own advantage. 

^ American Archives, 4th Series, vol. i., p. 1015. 

2 McAfee MSS. This is the point especially insisted on by 
Cornstalk in his speech to the adventurers in 1773; he would 
fight before seeing the whites drive off the game. 



Lord Dunmore's War 235 

In the decade before Lord Dunmore's war there 
had been much mutual wrong-doing between the 
northwestern Indians and the Virginian border- 
ers ; but on the whole the latter had occupied the 
position of being sinned against more often than 
that of sinning. The chief offence of the whites 
was that they trespassed upon uninhabited lands, 
which they forthwith proceeded to cultivate, in- 
stead of merely roaming over them to hunt the 
game and butcher one another. Doubtless occa- 
sional white men would murder an Indian if they 
got a chance, and the traders almost invariably 
cheated the tribesmen. But, as a whole, the 
traders were Indian rather than white in their 
sympathies, and the whites rarely made forays 
against their foes avowedly for horses and plun- 
der, while the Indians on their side were con- 
tinually indulging in such inroads. Every year 
parties of young red warriors crossed the Ohio to 
plunder the outlying farms, bum down the build- 
ings, scalp the inmates, and drive off the horses. ^ 
Year by year the exasperation of the borderers 
grew greater and the tale of the wrongs they had 
to avenge longer.^ Occasionally, they took a 

^ In the McAfee MSS., as already quoted, there is an 
account of the Shawnee war party whom the McAfees en- 
countered in 1773 returning from a successful horse-stealing 
expedition. 

2 American Archives, 4th Series, vol. i., S72. Dunmore, in 
his speech, enumerates nineteen men, women, and children, 



236 The Winning of the West 



brutal and ill-judged vengeance, which usually- 
fell on innocent Indians,' and raised up new foes 
for the whites. The savages grew continually- 
more hostile, and in the fall of 1773 their attacks 
became so frequent that it was evident a general 
outbreak was at hand; eleven people were mur- 
dered in the county of Fincastle alone. ^ The 
Shawnees were the leaders in all these outrages; 
but the outlaw bands, such as the Mingos and 
Cherokees, were as bad, and parties of Wyandots 
and Delawares, as well as of the various Miami and 
Wabash tribes, joined them. 

Thus the spring of 1774 opened with everything 
ripe for an explosion. The Virginian borderers 
were fearfully exasperated, and ready to take 
vengeance upon any Indians, whether peaceful or 
hostile ; while the Shawnees and ]\Iingos, on their 
side, were arrogant and overbearing, and yet 
alarmed at the continual advance of the whites. 
The headstrong rashness of Conolly, who was act- 
ing as Lord Dunmore's lieutenant on the border, 
and who was equally willing to plunge into a war 
with Pennsylvania or the Shawnees, served as a 

who had been killed by the Indians in 1771, '72, and '73, and 
these were but a small fraction of the whole. "This was 
before a drop of Shawnee blood was shed." 

^ Trans- Alleghany Pioneers, p. 262, gives an example that 
happened in 1772. 

^ American Archives, 4th Series, vol. i. Letter of Colonel 
William Preston, August 13, 1774. 



Lord Dunmore's War 237 

firebrand to ignite this mass of tinder. The bor- 
derers were anxious for a war; and Lord Dun- 
more was not incHned to baulk them. He was 
ambitious of glory, and probably thought that in 
the midst of the growing difficulties between the 
mother-country and the colonies, it would be good 
policy to distract the Virginians' minds by an 
Indian war, which, if he conducted it to a success- 
ful conclusion, might strengthen his own position.^ 



^ Many local historians, including Brantz Mayer (Logan 
and Cresap, p. S5), ascribe to the Earl treacherous motives. 
Brantz Mayer puts it thus : "It was probably Lord Dunmore's 
desire to incite a war which would arouse and band the 
savages of the West, so that in the anticipated struggle with 
the united colonies the British home-interest might ultimately 
avail itself of these children of the forest as ferocious and 
formidable allies in the onslaught on the Americans." This 
is much too futile a theory to need serious discussion. The 
war was of the greatest advantage to the American cause, 
for it kept the northwestern Indians off our hands for the 
first two years of the Revolutionary struggle; and had Lord 
Dunmore been the far-seeing and malignant being that this 
theory supposes, it would have been impossible for him not 
also to foresee that such a result was absolutely inevitable. 
There is no reason whatever to suppose that he was not doing 
his best for the Virginians; he deserved their gratitude, and 
he got it for the time being. The accusations of treachery 
against him were afterthoughts, and must be set down to 
mere vulgar rancor, unless, at least, some faint shadow of 
proof is advanced. When the Revolutionary War broke out, 
liowever, the Earl, undoubtedly, like so many other British 
officials, advocated the most outrageous measures to put 
down the insurgent colonists. 



238 The Winning of the West 

There were on the border at the moment three 
or four men whose names are so intimately bound 
up with the history of this war that they deserve 
a brief mention. One was Michael Cresap, a 
Maryland frontiersman, who had come to the 
banks of the Ohio with the purpose of making a 
home for his family. 1 He was of the regular pio- 
neer type : a good woodsman, sturdy and brave, 
a fearless fighter, devoted to his friends and his 
country; but also, when his blood was heated 
and his savage instincts fairly roused, inclined to 
regard any red man, whether hostile or friendly, 
as a being who should be slain on sight. Nor did 
he condemn the brutal deeds done by others on 
innocent Indians. 

The next was a man named Greathouse, of 
whom it is enough to know that, together with 
certain other men whose names have for the most 
part, by a merciful chance, been forgotten,^ he 

^ See Brantz Mayer, p. 86, for a very proper attack on 
those historians who stigmatize as land-jobbers and specu- 
lators the perfectly honest settlers, whose encroachments on 
the Indian hunting-grounds were so bitterly resented by the 
savages. Such attacks are mere pieces of sentimental in- 
justice. The settlers were perfectly right in feeling that they 
had a right to settle on the vast stretches of unoccupied 
ground, however wrong some of their individual deeds may 
have been. But Mayer, following Jacobs's Lije of Cresap, un- 
doubtedly paints his hero in altogether too bright colors. 

' Sappington, Tomlinson, and Baker were the names of 
three of his fellow-miscreants. See Jefferson MSS. 



Lord Dunmore's War 239 

did a deed such as could only be committed by 
inhuman and cowardly scoundrels. 

The other two actors in this tragedy were both 
Indians, and were both men of much higher 
stamp. One was Cornstalk, the Shawnee chief; a 
far-sighted seer, gloomily conscious of the im- 
pending ruin of his race, a great orator, a mighty 
warrior; a man who knew the value of his word 
and prized his honor, and who fronted death 
with quiet, disdainful heroism ; and yet a fierce, 
cruel, and treacherous savage to those with whom 
he was at enmity, a killer of women and children 
whom we first hear of in Pontiac's war, as joining 
in the massacre of unarmed and peaceful settlers 
who had done him no wrong, and who thought 
that he was friendly.' The other was Logan, an 
Iroquois warrior, who lived at that time away 
from the bulk of his people, but who was a man 
of note — in the loose phraseology of the border, a 
chief or headman — among the outlying parties 
of Senecas and Mingos, and the fragments of 
broken tribes that dwelt along the upper Ohio. 
He was a man of splendid appearance : over six 
feet high, straight as a spear-shaft, with a cotm- 
tenance as open as it was brave and manly, ^ until 

^ At Greenbriar. See " Narrative of Captain John Stewart," 
an actor in the war, Magazine of American History, vol. i., 
p. 671. 

' Loudon's Indian Narratives, ii., p. 323. 



240 The Winning of the West 

the wrongs he endured stamped on it an expres- 
sion of gloomy ferocity. He had always been the 
friend of the white man, and had been noted par- 
ticularly for his kindness and gentleness to chil- 
dren. Up to this time he had lived at peace with 
the borderers, for though some of his kin had been 
massacred by them years before, he had forgiven 
the deed^perhaps not unmindful of the fact that 
others of his kin had been concerned in still more 
bloody massacres of the whites. A skilled marks- 
man and mighty hunter, of commanding dignity, 
who treated all men with a grave courtesy that 
exacted the same treatment in return, he was 
greatly liked and respected by all the white hunt- 
ers and frontiersmen whose friendship and re- 
spect were worth having; they admired him for 
his dexterity and prowess, and they loved him for 
his straightforward honesty, and his noble loyalty 
to his friends. One of these old pioneer hunters 
has left on record ^ the statement that he deemed 
"Logan the best specimen of humanity he ever 
met with, either white or red." Such was Logan 
before the evil days came upon him. 

Early in the spring the outlying settlers began 
again to suffer from the deeds of straggling In- 
dians. Horses were stolen, one or two murders 
were committed, the inhabitants of the more 
lonely cabins fled to the forts, and the backwoods- 

* See American Pioneer, i., p. 189. 



Lord Dunmore's War 241 

men began to threaten fierce vengeance. On 
April 1 6th, three traders in the employ of a man 
named Butler were attacked by some of the out- 
law Cherokees, one killed, another wounded, and 
their goods plundered. Immediately after this 
Conolly issued an open letter, commanding the 
backwoodsmen to hold themselves in readiness to 
repel any attack by the Indians, as the Shawnees 
were hostile. Such a letter from Lord Dunmore's 
lieutenant amounted to a declaration of war, and 
there were sure to be plenty of backwoodsmen 
who would put a very liberal interpretation upon 
the order given them to repel an attack. Its 
effects were seen instantly. All the borderers 
prepared for war. Cresap was near Wheeling at 
the time, with a band of hunters and scouts — fear- 
less men, who had adopted many of the ways of 
the redskins, in addition to their method of fight- 
ing. As soon as they received Conolly's letter 
they proceeded to declare war in the regular In- 
dian style, calling a council, planting the war-post, 
and going through other savage ceremonies,' and 
eagerly waited for a chance to attack their 
foes. 

Unfortunately the first stroke fell on friendly 
Indians. The trader, Butler, spoken of above, in 

' Letter of George Rogers Clark, June 17, 1798. In Jef- 
ferson MSS., 5th Series, vol. i. (preserved in Archives of 
State Department at Wasliington) . 

VOL. I. — 16. I 



242 The Winning of the West 

order to recover some of the peltries of which he 
had been robbed by the Cherokees, had sent a 
canoe with two friendly Shawnees towards the 
place of the massacre. On the twenty-seventh, 
Cresap and his followers ambushed these men near 
Captina, and killed and scalped them. Some of 
the better backwoodsmen strongly protested 
against this outrage ^ ; but the mass of them were 
excited and angered by the rumor of Indian hos- 
tilities, and the brutal and disorderly side of fron- 
tier character was for the moment uppermost. 
They threatened to kill whoever interfered with 
them, cursing the "damned traders" as being 
worse than the Indians,* while Cresap boasted of 
the murder and never said a word in condemna- 
tion of the still worse deeds that followed it.^ The 
next day he again led out his men and attacked 
another party of Shawnees, who had been trading 
near Pittsburg, killed one and wounded two 
others, one of the whites being also hurt."* 



' Witness the testimony of one of the most gallant Indian 
fighters of the border, who was in Wheeling at the time; letter 
of Colonel Ebenezer Zane, February 4, 1800, in Jefferson 
MSS. 

^ Jefferson MSS. Deposition of John Gibson, April 4, 1800. 

3 Ibid. Deposition of William Huston, April 19, 1798; also 
depositions of Samuel McKee, etc. 

* American Archives, 4th Scries, vol. i., p. 468. Letter of 
Devereux Smith, June 10,1774. Gibson's letter. Also Jef- 
ferson MSS. 



Lord Dunmore's War 243 

Among the men who were with Cresap at this 
time was a young Virginian, who afterwards 
played a brilhant part in the history of the West, 
who was for ten years the leader of the bold 
spirits of Kentucky, and who rendered the whole 
United States signal and effective service by one 
of his deeds in the Revolutionary War. This was 
George Rogers Clark, then twenty-one years old.' 
He was of good family, and had been fairly well 
educated, as education went in colonial days ; but 
from his childhood he had been passionately fond 
of the wild roving life of the woods. He was a 
great hunter; and, Hke so many other young 
colonial gentlemen of good birth and bringing up 
and adventurous temper, he followed the hazard- 
ous profession of a backwoods surveyor. With 
chain and compass, as well as axe and rifle, he 
penetrated the far places of the wilderness, the 
lonely, dangerous regions where every weak man 
inevitably succumbed to the manifold perils en- 
countered, but where the strong and far-seeing 
were able to lay the foundations of fame and for- 
tune. He possessed high daring, unflinching 
courage, passions which he could not control, and 
a frame fitted to stand any strain of fatigue or 
hardship. He was a square-built, thick-set man, 

^Historical Magazine, i., p. i68. Born in Albemarle 
County, Va., November 19, 1752. 



244 The Winning of the West 

with high, broad forehead, sandy hair, and un- 
quailing blue eyes that looked out from under 
heav'y, shaggy brows. ^ 

Clark had taken part with Cresap in his assault 
upon the second party of Shawnees. On the fol- 
lowing day the whole band of whites prepared to 
march off and attack Logan's camp at Yellow 
Creek, some fifty miles distant. After going some 
miles they began to feel ashamed of their mission ; 
calling a halt, they discussed the fact that the 
camp they were preparing to attack consisted ex- 
clusively of friendly Indians, and mainly of women 
and children ; and forthwith abandoned their pro- 
posed trip and returned home. They were true 
borderers — brave, self-reliant, loyal to their 
friends, and good-hearted when their worst in- 
stincts were not suddenly aroused ; but the sight 
of bloodshed maddened them as if they had been 
so many wolves. Wrongs stirred to the depths 
their moody tempers and filled them with a brutal 
longing for indiscriminate revenge. When goaded 
by memories of evil, or when swayed by swift, 
fitful gusts of fury, the uncontrolled violence of 
their passions led them to commit deeds whose in- 
human barbarity almost equalled, though it could 

' Military Journal of Major Ebenezer Denny, with an in- 
troductory memoir by William H. Denny (Publication of the 
Historical Society of Pennsylvania), Philadelphia, i860, p. 
216. 



Lord Dunmore's War 245 

never surpass, that shown by the Indians them- 
selves.^ 

But Logan's people did not profit by Cresap's 
change of heart. On the last day of April a 
small party of men, women, and children, includ- 
ing almost all of Logan's kin, left his camp and 
crossed the river to visit Greathouse, as had been 
their custom ; for he made a trade of selling rum 
to the savages, though Cresap had notified him to 
stop. The whole party were pHed with hquor 
and became helplessly drunk, in which condition 
Greathouse and his associated criminals fell on 
and massacred them, nine souls in all.^ It was 

1 The Cresap apologists, including even Brantz Mayer, 
dwell on Cresap's nobleness in not massacring Logan's family! 
It was certainly to his credit that he did not do so, but it does 
not speak very well for him that he should have even enter- 
tained the thought. He was doubtless, on the whole, a brave, 
good-hearted man — quite as good as the average borderer; 
but nevertheless apt to be drawn into deeds that were the 
reverse of creditable. Mayer's book has merit; but he cer- 
tainly paints Logan too black and Cresap too white, and (see 
Appendix A, section 3, vol. ii.) is utterly wrong as to Logan's 
speech. He is right in recognizing the fact that in the war, 
as a whole, justice was on the side of the frontiersmen. 

2 Devereux Smith's letter. Some of the evil-doers after- 
wards tried to palliate their misdeeds by stating that Logan's 
brother, when drunk, insulted a white man, and that the 
other Indians were at the time on the point of executing an 
attack upon them. The last statement is self-evidently false; 
for had such been the case, the Indians would, of course, 
never have let some of their women and children put them- 
selves in the power of the whites, and get helplessly drunk; 



246 The Winning of the West 



an inhuman and revolting deed, which should con- 
sign the names of the perpetrators to eternal 
infamy. 

At once the frontier was in a blaze, and the 
Indians girded themselves for revenge. The Min- 
gos sent out runners to the other tribes, telling of 
the butchery, and calling on all the red men to 
join together for immediate and bloody ven- 
geance.' They confused the two massacres, at- 
tributing both to Cresap, whom they well knew 
as a warrior ^ ; and their women for long after- 
wards scared the children into silence by threat- 
ening them with Cresap 's name as with that of 
a monster. 3 They had indeed been brutally 
wronged; yet it must be remembered that they 
themselves were the first aggressors. They had 
causelessly murdered and robbed many whites, 
and now their sins had recoiled on the heads of 
the innocent of their own race. The conflict 
could not in any event have been delayed long; 
the frontiersmen were too deeply and too justly 
irritated. These particular massacres, however 
discreditable to those taking part in them, were 

and, anyhow, the allegations of such brutal and cowardly 
murderers are entirely unworthy of acceptance, unless backed 
up by outside evidence. 

^ Jefferson MSS., 5th Series, vol. i., Heckewelder's letter. 

' Jefferson MSS. Deposition of Colonel James Smith, May 
25, 1798. 

3 Ibid., Heckewelder's letter. 



Lord Dunmore's War 247 

the occasions, not the causes, of the war; and 
though they cast a dark shade on the conduct of 
the whites, they do not reheve the red men from 
the charge of having committed earher, more 
cruel, and quite as wanton outrages. 

Conolly, an irritable but irresolute man, was 
appalled by the storm he had helped raise. He 
meanly disclaimed all responsibility for Cresap's 
action,' and deposed him from his command of 
rangers ; to which, however, he was soon restored 
by Lord Dunmore. Both the Earl and his lieu- 
tenant, however, united in censuring severely 
Greathouse's deed.^' Conolly, throughout May, 
held a series of councils with the Delawares and 
Iroquois, in which he disclaimed and regretted 
the outrages and sought for peace. 3 To one of 
these councils the Delaware chief, Killbuck, with 
other warriors, sent a "talk," or "speech in writ- 
ing," 4 disavowing the deeds of one of their own 
parties of young braves, who had gone on the 
war-path; and another Delaware chief made a 
very sensible speech, saying that it was unfor- 
tunately inevitable that bad men on both sides 
should commit wrongs, and that the cooler heads 
should not be led away by acts due to the rashness 
and folly of a few. But the Shawnees showed no 
such spirit. On the contrary, they declared for 

' American Archives, 4th Series, vol. i., p. 475. 

"Ibid., p. 1015. 3 Ibid., p. 475. ^Ibid., p. 418 



24S The Winning of the West 

war outright, and sent a bold defiance to the Vir- 
ginians, at the same time telling Conolly plainly 
that he lied. Their message is noteworthy, be- 
cause, after expressing a firm belief that the Vir- 
ginian leader could control his warriors and stop 
the outrages if he wished, it added that the Shaw- 
nee headmen were able to do the like with their 
own men when they required it. This last allega- 
tion took away all shadow of excuse from the 
Shawnees for not having stopped the excesses of 
which their young braves had been guilty during 
the past few years. 

Though Conolly showed signs of flinching, his 
master the Earl had evidently no thought of shrink- 
ing from the contest. He at once began actively 
to prepare to attack his foes, and the Virginians 
backed him up heartily, though the Royal Gov- 
ernment, instead of supporting him, censured him 
in strong terms, and accused the whites of being 
the real aggressors and the authors of the war.^ 

In any event, it would have been out of the 

^ Ibid., p. 774. Letter of the Earl of Dartmouth, Septem- 
ber 10, 1774. A sufTicient answer, by the way, to the absurd 
charge that Dunmore brought on the war in consequence of 
some mysterious plan of the Home Government to embroil 
the Americans with the savages. It is not at all improbable 
that the crown advisers were not particularly displeased at 
seeing the attention of the Americans distracted by a war 
with the Indians; but this is the utmost that can be al- 
leged. 



Lord Dun more' s War 249 

question to avoid a contest at so late a date. Im- 
mediately after the murders in the end of April, 
the savages crossed the frontier in small bands. 
Soon all the back country was involved in the un- 
speakable horrors of a bloody Indian war, with 
its usual accompaniments of burning houses, tor- 
tured prisoners, and ruined families; the men 
being killed and the women and children driven 
off to a horrible captivity.^ The Indians declared 
that they were not at war with Pennsylvania,^ 
and the latter in turn adopted an attitude of neu- 
trality, openly disclaiming any share in the wrong 
that had been done, and assuring the Indians that 
it rested solely on the shoulders of the Virginians. ^ 
Indeed, the Shawnees protected the Pennsylvania 
traders from some hostile Mingos, while the 
Pennsylvania militia shielded a party of Shaw- 
nees from some of Conolly's men-*; and the 
Virginians, irritated by what they considered an 
abandonment of the white cause, were bent on 
destroying the Pennsylvania fur trade with the 
Indians. 5 Nevertheless, some of the bands of 
young braves who were out on the war-path 
failed to discriminate between white friends and 
foes, and a number of Pennsylvanians fell victims 
to their desire for scalps and their ignorance or 
indifference as to whom they were at war with.^ 

^ Ibid., -p. 808. ^ Ibid., p. ^06. ^ Ibid., p. ^4g. 

''Ibid., p. 478. *Ibid., p. 474. ^Ibid., p. 471. 



250 The Winning of the West 

The panic along the Pennsylvania frontier was 
terrible ; the out settlers fled back to the interior 
across the mountains, or gathered in numbers to 
defend themselves/ On the Virginian frontier, 
where the real attack was delivered, the panic was 
more justifiable; for terrible ravages were com- 
mitted, and the inhabitants were forced to gather 
together in their forted villages and could no 
longer cultivate their farms, except by stealth.^ 
Instead of being cowed, however, the backwoods- 
men clamored to be led against their foes, and 
made most urgent appeals for powder and lead, 
of which there was a great scarcity.^ 

The confusion was heightened by the anarchy 
in which the government of the northwestern dis- 
trict had been thrown in consequence of the quar- 
rel concerning the jurisdiction. The inhabitants 
were doubtful as to which colony really had a 
right to their allegiance, and many of the frontier 
officials were known to be double-faced, profess- 
ing allegiance to both governments. ^ When the 
Pennsylvanians raised a corps of a hundred rangers 
there almost ensued a civil war among the whites, 
for the Virginians were fearful that the movement 
was really aimed against them.^ Of course, the 
march of events gradually forced most, even of 

^Ibid., pp. 435, 467, 602. 
'Ibid., pp. 405, 707. 4 Ibid., p. 677. 

3 Ibid., p. 808. 5 Ibid., pp. 463, 467. 



Lord Dunmore's War 251 

the neutral Indians, to join their brethren who 
had gone on the war-path, and as an example of 
the utter confusion that reigned, the very Indians 
that were at war with one British colony, Vir- 
ginia, were still drawing supplies from the British 
post of Detroit.' 

Logan's rage had been terrible. He had 
changed and not for the better, as he grew older, 
becoming a sombre, moody man; worse than all, 
he had succumbed to the fire-water, the curse of 
his race. The horrible treachery and brutality of 
the assault wherein his kinsfolk were slain made 
him mad for revenge; every wolfish instinct in 
him came to the surface. He wreaked a terrible 
vengeance for his wrongs; but in true Indian 
fashion it fell, not on those who had caused them, 
but on others who were entirely innocent. In- 
deed, he did not know he had caused them. The 
massacres at Captina and Yellow Creek occurred 
so near together that they were confounded with 
each other; and not only the Indians but many 
whites as well,^ credited Cresap and Greathouse 
with being jointly responsible for both, and as 
Cresap was the most prominent, he was the one 
especially singled out for hatred. 

Logan instantly fell on the settlement with a 
small band of Mingo warriors. On his first foray 
he took thirteen scalps, among them those of six 

^ Ibid., -p. 684. "Ibid., p. 435- 



252 The Winning of the West 

children.^ A party of Virginians, under a man 
named McClure, followed him; but he ambushed 
and defeated them, slaying their leader.^ He re- 
peated these forays at least three times. Yet, in 
spite of his fierce craving for revenge, he still 
showed many of the traits that had made him 
beloved of his white friends. Having taken a 
prisoner, he refused to allow him to be tortured, 
and saved his life at the risk of his own. A few 
days afterwards he suddenly appeared to this 
prisoner with some gunpowder ink, and dictated 
to him a note. On his next expedition this note, 
tied to a war-club, was left in the house of a set- 
tler, whose entire family was murdered. It was 
a short document, written with ferocious direct- 
ness, as a kind of public challenge or taunt to the 
man whom he wrongly deemed to be the author 
of his misfortunes. It ran as follows: 



"Captain Cresap: 

" What did you kill my people on Yellow Creek 
for? The white people killed my kin at Cones- 
toga, a great while ago, and I thought nothing of 
that. But you killed my kin again on Yellow 
Creek, and took my cousin prisoner. Then I 
thought I must kill too; and I have been three 

^Ibid., pp. 468, 546. 'Ibid., p. 470. 



Lord Dunmore's War 253 

times to war since ; but the Indians are not angry, 

only myself. 

" Captain John Logan. 

"July 21, 1774.'" 

There is a certain deliberate and bloodthirsty 
earnestness about this letter which must have 
shown the whites clearly, if they still needed to be 
shown, what bitter cause they had to rue the 
wrongs that had been done to Logan, 

The Shawnees and Mingos were soon joined by 
many of the Delawares and outlying Iroquois, 
especially Senecas; as well as by the Wyandots 
and by large bands of ardent young warriors from 
among the Algonquin tribes along the Miami, the 
Wabash, and the Lakes. Their inroads on the 
settlements were characterized, as usual, by ex- 
treme stealth and merciless ferocity. They stole 
out of the woods with the silent cunning of wild 
beasts, and ravaged with a cruelty ten times 
greater. They burned down the lonely log-huts, 
ambushed travellers, shot the men as they hunted 
or tilled the soil, ripped open the women with 
child, and burned many of their captives at the 
stake. Their noiseless approach enabled them to 
fall on the settlers before their presence was sus- 
pected ; and they disappeared as suddenly as they 

^Jefferson MSS. Deposition of Wm. Robinson, February 
28, 1800, and letter from Harry Innes, March 2, 1799, with a 
copy of Logan's letter as made in his note-book at the time. 



254 The Winning of the West 

had come, leaving no trail that could be followed. 
The charred huts and scalped and mangled bodies 
of their victims were left as ghastly reminders of 
their visit, the sight stirring the backwoodsmen to 
a frenzy of rage all the more terrible in the end, 
because it was impotent for the time being. Gen- 
erally, they made their escape successfully ; occa- 
sionally, they were beaten off or overtaken and 
killed or scattered. 

When they met armed woodsmen the fight was 
always desperate. In May, a party of hunters and 
surveyors, being suddenly attacked in the forest, 
beat off their assailants and took eight scalps, 
though with a loss of nine of their own number.' 
Moreover, the settlers began to band together to 
make retaliatory inroads; and while Lord Dun- 
more was busily preparing to strike a really effec- 
tive blow, he directed the frontiersmen of the 
Northwest to undertake a foray, so as to keep the 
Indians employed. Accordingly, they gathered 
together, four hundred strong,^ crossed the Ohio in 
the end of July, and marched against a Shawnee 
town on the Muskingum. They had a brisk skir- 
mish with the Shawnees, drove them back, and 
took five scalps, losing two men killed and five 
wounded. Then the Shawnees tried to ambush 

^American Archives, p. 373. 

' Under a certain Angus MacDonald — ibid., p. 722. They 
crossed the Ohio at Fish Creek, 120 miles below Pittsburg. 



Lord Dunmore's War 255 

them, but their ambush was discovered and they 
promptly fled, after a sHght skirmish, in which no 
one was killed but one Indian, whom Cresap, a 
very active and vigorous man, ran down and slew 
with his tomahawk.' The Shawnee village was 
burned, seventy acres of standing com were cut 
down, and the settlers returned in triumph. On 
the march back they passed through the towns of 
the peaceful Moravian Delawares, to whom they 
did no harm. 

^American Archives, 4th Series, vol. i., pp. 682, 684. 



APPENDIX A 

TO CHAPTER IV 

IT is greatly to be wished that some competent 
person would write a full and true history of 
our national dealings with the Indians. Un- 
doubtedly the latter have often suffered terrible 
injustice at our hands. A number of instances, 
such as the conduct of the Georgians to the Chero- 
kees in the early part of the present century, or 
the whole treatment of Chief Joseph and his Nez 
Perges, might be mentioned, which are indelible 
blots on our fair fame; £.^d yet, in describing our 
dealings with the red meu as a whole, historians 
do us much less than justice. 

It was wholly impossible to avoid conflicts with 
the weaker race, unless we were willing to see the 
American continent fall into the hands of some 
other strong power; and even had we adopted 
such a ludicrous policy, the Indians themselves 
would have made war upon us. It cannot be too 
often insisted that they did not own the land ; or, 
at least, that their ownership was merely such as 
that claimed often by our own white hunters. If 
the Indians really owned Kentuclcy in 1775, then 

VOL. I.— 17. 257 



258 The Winning of the West 

in 1776 it was the property of Boon and his asso- 
ciates; and to dispossess one party was as great 
a wrong as to dispossess the other. To recognize 
the Indian ownership of the Hmitless prairies and 
forests of this continent — that is, to consider the 
dozen squahd savages who hunted at long inter- 
vals over a territory of a thousand square miles as 
owning it outright — necessarily implies a similar 
recognition of the claims of every white hunter, 
squatter, horse-thief, or wandering cattleman. 
Take as an example the country round the Little 
Missouri. When the cattlemen, the first actual 
settlers, came into this land in 1882, it was already 
scantily peopled by a few white hunters and trap- 
pers. The latter were extremely jealous of in- 
trusion; they had held their own in spite of the 
Indians, and, like the Indians, the inrush of set- 
tlers and the consequent destruction of the game 
meant their own undoing; also, again like the 
Indians, they felt that their having hunted over 
the soil gave them a vague prescriptive right to its 
sole occupation, and they did their best to keep 
actual settlers out. In some cases, to avoid diffi- 
culty, their nominal claims were bought up ; gen- 
erally, and rightly, they were disregarded. Yet 
they certainly had as good a right to the Little 
Missouri country as the Sioiix have to most of the 
land on their present reservations. In fact, the 
mere statement of the case is sufficient to show 



Appendix A 259 

the absurdity of asserting that the land, really be- 
longed to the Indians. The different tribes have 
always been utterly unable to define their own 
boundaries. Thus the Delawares and Wyandots, 
in 1785, though entirely separate nations, claimed 
and, in a certain sense, occupied almost exactly 
the same territory. 

Moreover, it was wholly impossible for our 
policy to be always consistent. Nowadays we 
undoubtedly ought to break up the great Indian 
reservations, disregard the tribal governments, 
allot the land in severalty .(with, however, only a 
limited power of alienation), and treat the In- 
dians as we do other citizens, with certain excep- 
tions, for their sakes as well as ours. But this 
policy, which it would be wise to follow now, 
would have been wholly impracticable a century 
since. Our central government was then too 
weak either effectively to control its own mem- 
bers or adequately to punish aggressions made 
upon them; and even if it had been strong, it 
would probably have proved impossible to keep 
entire order over such a vast, sparsely peopled 
frontier, with such turbulent elements on both 
sides. The Indians could not be treated as indi- 
viduals at that time. There was no possible al- 
ternative, therefore, to treating their tribes as 
nations, exactly as the French and English had 
done before us. Our difficulties were partly in- 



26o The Winning of the West 

herited from these, our predecessors, were partly 
caused by our own misdeeds, but were mainly the 
inevitable result of the conditions under which the 
problem had to be solved; no human wisdom or 
virtue could have worked out a peaceable solu- 
tion. As a nation, our Indian policy is to be 
blamed, because of the weakness it displayed, be- 
cause of its shortsightedness, and its occasional 
leaning to the policy of the sentimental humani- 
tarians; and we have often promised what was 
impossible to perform; but there has been little 
wilful wrong-doing. Our government almost al- 
ways tried to act fairly by the tribes; the gov- 
ernmental agents (some of whom have been 
dishonest, and others foolish, but who, as a class, 
have been greatly traduced), in their reports, are 
far more apt to be unjust to the whites than to the 
reds; and the Federal authorities, though imable 
to prevent much of the injustice, still did check 
and control the white borderers very much more 
effectually than the Indian sachems and war 
chiefs controlled their young braves. The tribes 
were warlike and bloodthirsty, jealous of each 
other and of the whites; they claimed the land 
for their hunting-grounds, but their claims all con- 
flicted with one another ; their knowledge of their 
own boundaries was so indefinite that they were 
always willing, for inadequate compensation, to 
sell land to which they had merely the vaguest 



Appendix A 261 

title; and yet, when once they had received the 
goods, were generally reluctant to make over even 
what they could; they coveted the goods and 
scalps of the whites, and the young warriors were 
always on the alert to commit outrages when they 
could do it with impunity. On the other hand, the 
evil-disposed whites regarded the Indians as fair 
game for robbery and violence of any kind; and 
the far larger number of well-disposed men, who 
would not willingly wrong any Indian, were them- 
selves maddened by the memories of hideous in- 
juries received. They bitterly resented the action 
of the government, which, in their eyes, failed to 
properly protect them and yet sought to keep 
them out of waste, uncultivated lands which they 
did not regard as being any more the property of 
the Indians than of their own hunters. With the 
best intentions, it was wholly impossible for any 
government to evolve order out of such a chaos 
without resort to the ultimate arbitrator — the 
sword. 

The purely sentimental historians take no ac- 
count of the difficulties under which we labored 
nor of the countless wrongs and provocations we 
endured, while grossly magnifying the already 
lamentably large number of injuries for which we 
really deserve to be held responsible. To get a 
fair idea of the Indians of the present day, and of 
our dealings with them, we have fortunately one 



262 The Winning of the West 

or two excellent books, notably Hunting Grounds 
of the Great West and Owr Wild Indians, by Colonel 
Richard I. Dodge (Hartford, 1882) ; and Massacres 
of the Mountains, by J. P. Dunn (New York, 1886) . 
As types of the opposite class, which are worse 
than valueless, and which nevertheless might 
cause some hasty future historian, unacquainted 
w4th the facts, to fall into grievous error, I may 
mention A Century of Dishonor, by H. H. (Mrs. 
Helen Hunt Jackson), and Our Indian Wards 
(George W. Manypenny). The latter is a mere 
spiteful diatribe against various army officers, 
and neither its manner nor its matter warrants 
more than an allusion. Mrs. Jackson's book 
is capable of doing more harm because it is 
written in good English, and because the author, 
who had lived a pure and noble life, was intensely 
in earnest in what she wrote, and had the most 
praiseworthy purpose — to prevent our committing 
any more injustice to the Indians. This was all 
most proper ; every good man or woman should do 
whatever is possible to make the government 
treat the Indians of the present time in the fairest 
and most generous spirit, and to provide against 
any repetition of such outrages as were inflicted 
upon the Nez Perges and upon part of the Chey- 
ennes, or the wrongs with which the civilized 
nations of the Indian Territory are sometimes 
threatened. The purpose of the book is excellent, 



Appendix A 263 

but the spirit in which it is written cannot be 
called even technically honest. As a polemic, it 
is possible that it did not do harm (though the 
effect of even a polemic is marred by hysterical 
indifference to facts). As a history it would be 
beneath criticism, were it not that the high char- 
acter of the author and her excellent literary work ^ 
in other directions have given it a fictitious value 
and made it much quoted by the large class of 
amiable but maudHn fanatics concerning whom it 
may be said that the excellence of their inten- 
tions but indifferently atones for the invariable 
folly and ill effect of their actions. It is not too 
much to say that the book is thoroughly untrust- 
worthy from cover to cover, and that not a single 
statement it contains should be accepted without 
independent proof; for even those that are not 
absolutely false are often as bad on account of so 
much of the truth having been suppressed. One 
effect of this is, of course, that the author's re- 
citals of the many real wrongs of Indian tribes 
utterly fail to impress us, because she lays quite 
as much stress on those that are non-existent, and 
on the equally numerous cases where the wrong- 
doing was wholly the other way. To get an idea 
of the value of the work, it is only necessary to 
compare her statements about almost any tribe 
with the real facts, choosing at random; for in- 
stance, compare her accounts of the Sioux and the 



264 The Winnin^: of the West 



fc. 



plains tribes generally with those given by Colonel 
Dodge in his two books; or her recital of the 
Sandy Creek massacre with the facts as stated by 
Mr. Dunn — who is apt, if anything, to lean to the 
Indian's side. 

These foolish sentimentalists not only write 
, foul slanders about their own countrymen, but 
are themselves the worst possible advisers on any 
point touching Indian management. They would 
do well to heed General Sheridan's bitter words, 
written when many Easterners were clamoring 
against the army authorities because they took 
partial vengeance for a series of brutal outrages: 
"I do not know how far these humanitarians 
should be excused on account of their ignorance; 
but surely it is the only excuse that can give a 
shadow of justification for aiding and abetting 
such horrid crimes." 



APPENDIX B 

TO CHAPTER V 

In Mr. Shaler's entertaining History of Ken- 
tucky there is an account of the population of 
the western frontiers and Kentucky, interesting 
because it illustrates some of the popular delu- 
sions on the subject. He speaks (pp. 9, 11, 23) 
of Kentucky as containing "nearly pure English 



Appendix B 265 

blood, mainly derived through the old Dominion, 
and altogether from districts that shared the Vir- 
ginian conditions." As much of the blood was 
Pennsylvanian or North Carolinian, his last sen- 
tence means nothing, unless all the "districts" 
outside of New England are held to have shared 
the Virginian conditions. Turning to Marshall 
(i., 441) we see that in 1780 about half the people 
were from Virginia, Pennsylvania furnishing the 
next greatest number ; and of the Virginians most 
were from a population much more like that of 
Pennsylvania than like that of "tide-water" Vir- 
ginia; as we learn from twenty sources, such as 
Waddell's Annals of Augusta County. Mr. Shaler 
speaks of the Huguenots and of the Scotch immi- 
grants, who came over after 1745; but actually 
makes no mention of the Presbyterian Irish or 
Scotch-Irish, much the most important element 
in all the West ; in fact, on p. 10, he impliedly ex- 
cludes any such immigration at all. He greatly 
underestimates the German element, which was 
important in West Virginia. He sums up by 
stating that the Kentuckians come from the 
"truly British people," quite a different thing 
from his statement that they are "English." 

The "truly British people" consists of a con- 
glomerate of as distinct races as exist anywhere 
in Aryan Europe. The Erse, Welsh, and Gaelic 
immigrants to America are just as distinct from 



266 The Winning of the West 

the English, just as "foreign" to them, as are the 
Scandinavians, Germans, Hollanders, and Hugue- 
nots — often more so. Such early families as the 
Welsh Shelbys, and Gaelic McAfees are no more 
English than are the Huguenot Seviers or the 
German Stoners. Even including merely the im- 
migrants from the British Isles, the very fact that 
the Welsh, Irish, and Scotch, in a few generations, 
fuse with the English instead of each element 
remaining separate, makes the American popula- 
tion widely different from that of Britain; ex- 
actly as a flask of water is different from two cans 
of hydrogen and oxygen gas. Mr. Shaler also 
seems inclined to look down a little on the Ten- 
nesseeans, and to consider their population as 
composed in part of inferior elements ; but in real- 
ity, though there are very marked differences be- 
tween the two commonwealths of Kentucky and 
Tennessee, yet they resemble one another more 
closely, in blood and manners, than either does 
any other American State; and both have too 
just cause for pride to make it necessary for either 
to sneer at the other, or, indeed, at any State of 
our mighty Federal Union. In their origin they 
were precisely alike; but whereas the original 
pioneers, the hunters and Indian fighters, kept 
possession of Tennessee as long as they lived, — 
Jackson, at Sevier's death, taking the latter's place 
with even more than his power, — in Kentucky, 



Appendix B 267 

on the other hand, after twenty years' rule, the 
first settlers were swamped by the great inrush 
of immigration, and with the defeat of Logan for 
governor the control passed into the hands of the 
same class of men that then ruled Virginia. After 
that date the "tide- water" stock assumed an im- 
portance in Kentucky it never had in Tennessee ; 
and, of course, the influence of the Scotch-Irish 
blood was greatly diminished. 

Mr. Shaler's error is trivial compared to that 
made by another and even more brilliant writer. 
In the History of the People of the United States, by 
Professor McMaster (New York, 1887), p. 70, 
there is a mistake so glaring that it would not 
need notice, were it not for the many excellences 
and wide repute of Professor McMaster's book. 
He says that of the immigrants to Kentucky, 
most had come "from the neighboring States of 
Carolina and Georgia," and shows that this is not 
a mere slip of the pen, by elaborating the state- 
ment in the following paragraphs, again speaking 
of North and South Carolina and Georgia as fur- 
nishing the colonists to Kentucky. This shows 
a complete misapprehension not only of the feed- 
ing-grounds of the western emigration, but of the 
routes it followed, and of the conditions of the 
Southern States. South Carolina furnished very 
few emigrants to Kentucky, and Georgia practical- 
ly none ; combined, they probably did not furnish 



268 The Winning of the West 

as many as New Jersey or Maryland. Georgia 
was herself a frontier community; she received 
instead of sending out immigrants. The bulk of 
the South Carolina emigration went to Georgia. 



APPENDIX C 

TO CHAPTER VI 

Office of the Secretary of State, 

Nashville, Tenn., June 12, 1888. 
Hon. Theodore Roosevelt, 
Sagamore Hill, 

Long Island, N. Y. 

Dear Sir: 

I was bom, "raised," and have always lived in 
Washington County, E. Tenn. Was bom on the 
" head-waters " of " Boone's Creek," in said county. 
I resided for several years in the "Boone's Creek 
Civil District," in Washington County (this some 
"twenty years ago"), within two miles of the his- 
toric tree in question, on which is carved, "D. 
Boon cilled a bar &c."; having visited and exam- 
ined the tree more than once. The tree is a 
beech, still standing, though fast decaying. It is 
located some eight miles northeast of Jonesboro, 
the county seat of Washington, on the "waters of 
Boone's Creek," which creek was named after 
Daniel Boone, and on which (creek) it is certain 



Appendix C 269 

Daniel Boone "camped" during a winter or two. 
The tree stands about two miles from the spring, 
where it has always been understood Boone's 
camp was. More than twenty years ago, I have 
heard old gentlemen (living in the neighborhood 
of the tree), who were then from fifty to seventy 
years old, assert that the carving was on the tree 
when they were boys, and that the tradition in 
the community was that the inscription was on 
the tree when discovered by the first permanent 
settlers. The posture of the tree is " leaning," so 
that a "bar," or other animal could ascend it 
without difficulty. 

While the letters could be clearly traced when 
I last looked at them, still because of the expan- 
sion of the bark, it was difficult, and I heard old 
gentlemen years ago remark upon the changed 
appearance of the inscription from what it was 
when they first knew it. 

Boone certainly camped for a time under the 
tree; the creek is named after him (has always 
been known as Boone's Creek) ; the Civil District 
is named after him, and the post-office also. True, 
the story as to the carving is traditionary, but a 
man had as well question in that community the 
authenticity of "Holy Writ," as the fact that 
Boone carved the inscription on that tree. 
I am very respectfully 

John Allison. 



2/0 The Winning of the West 
APPENDIX D 

TO CHAPTER VI 

The following copy of an original note of Boon's 
was sent me by Judge John N. Lea: 

July the 20", 1786. Sir, The Land has Been 
Long Survayd and Not Knowing When the 
Money would be Rady Was the Reason of my not 
Returning the Works however the may be Re- 
turned when you pleas. But I must have Nother 
Copy of the Entry as I have lost that I had when 
I lost my plating instruments and only have the 
Short Field Notes. Just the Corse Distance and 
Comer trees pray send me Nother Copy that I 
may know how to give it the proper bounderry 
agreeable to the Location and I Will send the plat 
to the offis medetly if you chose it, the expense is 
as follows 

Survayer's fees £ g 3 8 

Ragesters fees 7 14 o 

Chanman 8 o o 

purvisions of the tower. ... 2 00 

£26 17 8 

You will also Send a Copy of the agreement 
betwixt Mr. [illegible] overton and myself Where I 
Red the warrants. 

I am, sir, your omble servant, 

Daniel Boone. 



Appendix E 271 

APPENDIX E 

TO CHAPTER VII 

Recently one or two histories of the times and 
careers of Robertson and Sevier have been pub- 
lished by "Edmund Kirke," Mr. James R. Gil- 
more, They are charmingly written, and are of 
real service as calling attention to a neglected 
portion of our history and making it interesting. 
But they entirely fail to discriminate between the 
provinces of history and fiction. It is greatly to 
be regretted that Mr. Gilmore did not employ his 
powers in writing an avowed historical novel, treat- 
ing of the events he discusses ; such a work from 
him would have a permanent value, like John P. 
Kennedy's Horseshoe Robinson. In their pres- 
ent form his works cannot be accepted even as 
offering material on which to form a judgment, ex- 
cept in so far as they contain repetitions of state- 
ments given by Ramsey or Putnam. I say this 
with real reluctance, for my relations with Mr. 
Gilmore personally have been pleasant. I was at 
the outset prepossessed in favor of his books ; but 
as soon as I came to study them I found that 
(except for what was drawn from the printed Ten- 
nessee State histories) they were extremely un- 
trustworthy. Oral tradition has a certain value 
of its own, if used with great discretion and in- 
telHgence; but it is rather startling to find any 



2 72 The Winning of the West 

one blandly accepting as gospel alleged oral tradi- 
tions gathered one hundred and twenty-five years 
after the event, especially when they relate to 
such subjects as the losses and numbers of Indian 
war parties. No man with the slightest know- 
ledge of frontiersmen or frontier Hfe could commit 
such a mistake. If any one wishes to get at the 
value of oral tradition of an Indian fight a century 
old, let him go out West and collect the stories of 
Custer's battle, which took place only a dozen 
years ago. I think I have met or heard of fifty 
"solitary survivors" of Custer's defeat; and I 
could collect certainly a dozen complete accounts 
of both it and Reno's fight, each believed by a 
goodly number of men, and no two relating the 
story in an even approximately similar fashion. 
Mr. Gilmore apparently accepts all such accounts 
indiscriminately, and embodies them in his narra- 
tive without even a reference to his authorities. 
I particularize one or two out of very many in- 
stances in the chapters dealing with the Cherokee 
wars. 

Books founded upon an indiscriminate accept- 
ance of any and all such traditions or alleged tra- 
ditions are a little absurd, unless, as already said, 
they are avowedly merely historic novels, when 
they may be both useful and interesting. I am 
obliged to say with genuine regret, after careful 
examination of Mr. Gilmore's books, that I cannot 



Appendix E 273 

accept any single unsupported statement they 
contain as even requiring an examination into its 
probability. I would willingly pass them by with- 
out comment, did I not fear that my silence might 
be construed into an acceptance of their truth. 
Moreover, I notice that some writers, like the 
editors of the Cydopcudia of American Biography, 
seem inclined to take the volumes seriously. 

END OF VOLUME I 



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